The Vietnam War

Vietnam was the longest war in American history and the most unpopular American war of the 20th century. It resulted in nearly 60,000 American deaths and in an estimated 2 million Vietnamese deaths. Even today, many Americans still ask whether the American effort in Vietnam was a sin, a blunder, a necessary war, or whether it was a noble cause, or an idealistic, if failed, effort to protect the South Vietnamese from totalitarian government.

Summary:

Between 1945 and 1954, the Vietnamese waged an anti-colonial war against France, which received $2.6 billion in financial support from the United States. The French defeat at the Dien Bien Phu was followed by a peace conference in Geneva. As a result of the conference, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam received their independence, and Vietnam was temporarily divided between an anti-Communist South and a Communist North. In 1956, South Vietnam, with American backing, refused to hold unification elections. By 1958, Communist-led guerrillas, known as the Viet Cong, had begun to battle the South Vietnamese government.

To support the South's government, the United States sent in 2,000 military advisors--a number that grew to 16,300 in 1963. The military condition deteriorated, and by 1963, South Vietnam had lost the fertile Mekong Delta to the Viet Cong. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson escalated the war, commencing air strikes on North Vietnam and committing ground forces--which numbered 536,000 in 1968. The 1968 Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese turned many Americans against the war.

The next president, Richard Nixon, advocated Vietnamization, withdrawing American troops and giving South Vietnam greater responsibility for fighting the war. In 1970, Nixon attempted to slow the flow of North Vietnamese soldiers and supplies into South Vietnam by sending American forces to destroy Communist supply bases in Cambodia. This act violated Cambodian neutrality and provoked antiwar protests on the nation's college campuses.

From 1968 to 1973, efforts were made to end the conflict through diplomacy. In January 1973, an agreement was reached; U.S. forces were withdrawn from Vietnam, and U.S. prisoners of war were released. In April 1975, South Vietnam surrendered to the North, and Vietnam was reunited.

The Meaning of the Vietnam War

For today's students, the Vietnam War is almost as remote as World War I was for the soldiers who fought it. Now that the United States and Vietnam have normalized relations, it is especially difficult for many young people to understand why the war continues to evoke deeply felt emotions. Thus, it is especially important for students to learn about a war whose consequences strongly influence attitudes and policies even today.

The Vietnam War was the longest war in American history and the most unpopular American war of the 20th century. It resulted in nearly 60,000 American deaths and an estimated 2 million Vietnamese deaths. It was the first war to come into American living rooms nightly, and the only conflict that ended in defeat for American arms. The war caused turmoil on the home front, as anti-war protests became a feature of American life. Americans divided into two camps--pro-war hawks and anti-war doves.

The questions raised by the Vietnam War have not faded with time. Even today, many Americans still ask:

Whether the American effort in Vietnam was a sin, a blunder, or a necessary war; or whether it was a noble cause, or an idealistic, if failed, effort to protect the South Vietnamese from totalitarian government;

Whether the military was derelict in its duty when it promised to win the war; or whether arrogant civilians ordered the military into battle with one hand tied and no clear goals;

Whether the American experience in Vietnam should stand as a warning against state building projects in violent settings; or whether it taught Americans to perform peacemaking operations and carry out state building correctly;

Whether the United States’ involvement in Vietnam meant it was obligated to continue to protect the South Vietnamese.

Images of a Tragic War

The prize-winning photographs are among the most searing and painful images of the Vietnam War era. These images helped define the meaning of the war. They also illustrate the immense power of photography to reveal war's brutality.

One photograph shows a Buddhist monk calmly burning himself to death to protest the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government. Photographs of this horrific event raised a public outcry against the corruption and religious discrimination of the government of Ngo Dinh Diem, the Catholic president of South Vietnam. Eight more monks and nuns immolated themselves in the following months.

Another photograph shows a 9-year-old girl, running naked and screaming in pain after a fiery napalm attack on her village. The napalm (jellied gasoline) has burned through her skin and muscle down to her bone. The photograph of her anguished, contorted face helped to end American involvement in the Vietnam War.

A third image shows a stiff-armed South Vietnamese police chief about to shoot a bound Viet Cong prisoner in the head. The victim, a Viet Cong lieutenant, was alleged to have wounded a police officer during North Vietnam's Tet offensive of 1968. The photograph became a symbol of the war's casual brutality.

A fourth photograph, taken by a 21-year-old college journalist, shows the body of a 20-year-old student protestor at Ohio's Kent State University lying limp on the ground, shot to death by National Guardsmen. In the center of the picture, a young woman kneels over the fallen student, screaming and throwing up her arms in agony.

A fifth picture captured the fall of Saigon during the last chaotic days of the Vietnam War. The photo shows desperate Vietnamese crowding on the roof of the U.S. Agency for International Development building trying to board a silver Huey helicopter. Taken on April 30, 1975, the photograph captured the moment when the last U.S. officials abandoned South Vietnam, and South Vietnamese military and political leaders fled their own country, while hundreds of Vietnamese left behind raise their arms helplessly.

Photographs have the power to capture an event and burn it into our collective memory. Photographs can trap history in amber, preserving a fleeting moment for future generations to re-experience. Photographs can evoke powerful emotions and shape the way the public understands the world and interprets events. Each of these pictures played a role in turning American public opinion against the Vietnam War. But pictures never tell the full story. By focusing on a single image, they omit the larger context essential for true understanding.

Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the 9-year-old girl running naked down the road in the photograph, was born in 1963 in a small village in South Vietnam's Central Highlands. Kim Phuc was the daughter of a rice farmer and a cook. In June 1972, she and her family took refuge in a Buddhist temple when South Vietnamese bombers flew over her village. Four bombs fell toward her. The strike was a case of friendly fire, the result of a mistake by the South Vietnamese air force.

There was an orange fireball, and Kim Phuc was hit by napalm. Her clothes were vaporized; her ponytail was sheared off by the napalm. Her arms, shoulders, and back were so badly burned that she needed 17 major operations. She started screaming, "Nong qua! Nong qua!” (too hot!) as she ran down the road. Her scarring is so severe that she will not wear short-sleeve shirts to this day. She still suffers from severe pain from the burns, which left her without sweat or oil glands over half of her body.

Two infant cousins died in the attack, but Kim Phuc, her parents, and seven siblings survived. The man who took her photograph, 21-year-old Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut, was also Vietnamese; his brother was killed while covering combat in Vietnam's Mekong Delta for the Associate Press. After the napalm attack, Ut put her into a van and rushed her to a South Vietnamese hospital, where she spent 14 months recovering from her burns.

In 1986, Kim Phuc (whose name means "Golden Happiness") persuaded the Vietnamese government to allow her to go to Cuba to study pharmacology. In 1992, while in Cuba, she met and married a fellow Vietnamese student. Later that year, she and her husband defected to Canada while on a flight from Cuba to Moscow. Today, she serves as an unpaid goodwill ambassador for UNESCO and runs a non-profit organization that provides aid to child war victims. Her husband cares for mentally disabled adults.

Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the South Vietnamese police chief who executed the Viet Cong prisoner in 1968, had a reputation for ruthlessness. While serving as a colonel in 1966, he led tanks and armored vehicles into the South Vietnamese city of Danang to suppress rebel insurgents. Hundreds of civilians as well as Viet Cong were killed. In early 1968, at the height of the Tet offensive, Loan was working around the clock to defend the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon. He had asked a regimental commander to execute the prisoner, but when the commander hesitated, Loan said, "'I must do it.' If you hesitate, if you didn't do your duty, the men won't follow you."

The photograph taken at Kent State in Ohio shows a terrified young woman, Mary Ann Vecchio, a 14-year-old runaway from Florida, kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller. Miller, a Kent State University student, had been protesting American involvement in Vietnam even before attending college. At the age of 15, he had composed a poem titled "Where Does It End," expressing his horror about "the war without a purpose."

Miller was shot and killed during an anti-war protest that followed the announcement that U.S. troops had moved into Cambodia. An ROTC building on the university's campus was burned, and in response, the mayor of Kent called in the National Guard.

On May 4, 1970, the guardsmen threw tear gas canisters at the crowd of student protesters. Students threw the canisters back along with rocks, the guardsman later claimed. The 28 guardsmen fired more than 60 shots, killing four students (two of them protesters) and injuring nine (one was left permanently paralyzed).

A Justice Department report determined that the shootings were "unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable," but an Ohio grand jury found that the Guard had acted in self-defense and indicted students and faculty for triggering the disturbance.

Ho Chi Minh

Ho Chi Minh was a tiny man, frail in appearance and extremely deferential. He wore simple shorts and sandals. To his followers, he was known simply as “Uncle Ho.”

Ho Chi Minh was born in 1890 in a village in central Vietnam. In 1912, he left his homeland and signed aboard a French freighter. For a time, he lived in the United States-- visiting Boston, New York, and San Francisco. Ho was struck by Americans’ impatience. Later, during the Vietnam War, he told his military advisers, “Don’t worry, Americans are an impatient people. When things begin to go wrong, they’ll leave.”

After three years of travel, Ho Chi Minh settled in London where he worked at the elegant Carlton Hotel. He lived in squalid quarters and learned that poverty existed even in the wealthiest, most powerful countries. In Paris, he came into contact with the French left. He was still in Paris when World War I ended and the peace conference was held. Inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s call for universal self-determination, Ho wrote,”all subject peoples are filled with hope by the prospect that an era of right and justice is opening to them.”

Ho wanted to meet Wilson and plead the cause of Vietnamese independence. Wilson ignored his request.

Ho then traveled to Moscow, where Lenin had declared war against imperialism. While in the Soviet Union, Ho embraced socialism. By the early 1920s, he was actively organizing Vietnamese exiles into a revolutionary force.

In 1941, Ho returned to Vietnam. The time was right, he believed, to free Vietnam from colonial domination. Ho aligned himself with the United States. In 1945, borrowing passages from the Declaration of Independence, Ho declared Vietnamese independence.

However, the French, who returned to Vietnam after World War II, had different plans for Vietnam.

The French Vietnam War

After World War II, neither France nor England wanted to see the end of their colonial empires. England was anxious to control Burma, Malaya, and India. France wanted to rule Indochina.

Under Franklin Roosevelt, the United States sought to bring an end to European colonialism. As he put it, condescendingly:

“There are 1.1 billion brown people. In many Eastern countries they are ruled by a handful of whites and they resent it. Our goal must be to help them achieve independence. 1.1 billion potential enemies are dangerous.”

But under Harry Truman, the United States was concerned about its naval and air bases in Asia. The U.S. decided to permit France into Indochina to re-assert its authority in Southeast Asia. The result: the French Indochina War began.

From the beginning, American intelligence officers knew that France would find it difficult to re-assert its authority in Indochina. The French refused to listen to American intelligence. To them, the idea of Asian rebels standing up to a powerful Western nation was preposterous.

Although Truman allowed the French to return to Indochina, he was not yet prepared to give the French arms, transportation, and economic assistance. It was not until anti-communism became a major issue that the United States would take an active role supporting the French. The fall of China, the Korean War, and the coming of Joe McCarthy would lead policymakers to see the French War in Vietnam, not as a colonial war, but as a war against international communism.