Vietnam, war, and the United States

Interactions among Vietnam, war, and the United States go back much farther than many realize, including having a direct influence on the Japanese attack at the Battle of Pearl Harbor. In early 1941, the U.S. had troubled relations with Vichy France, which controlled what was then French Indochina. The U.S. gave two conditional embargoes to Japan, on metal and oil, which would be withdrawn only if Japan withdrew from Indochina. Japan considered expansion into Southeast Asia, as well as the Western shipments, as a matter of national security, and, for its internal reasons, chose war as a means of achieving its resource goals.

Following World War II, there were many issues, worldwide, with colonial states. In general, the U.S. did not support the restoral of colonial rule, but it was also developing a containment policy toward Communism. In 1945, China was in civil war, and some of the Vietnamese politicians in exile were in China. An Office of Strategic Services team, commanded by MAJ Archimedes Patti, had been in China with the Vietnamese, and moved south with them. The formal containment policy would not emerge until 1947, but Washington was already uncomfortable with relations with any Communist organization, internal or external.

Partition, 1954

While some U.S. leaders, such as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Arthur Radford had recommended U.S. military intervention to help the French hold Dien Bien Phu, this idea gained very little momentum, and was firmly rejected by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the focus of U.S. interest moved to the Geneva conference on the future of Indochina. Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was vigorously opposed to any relations with Communist parties.

By the end of French rule in 1954, however, the U.S. had a clear policy of containment (see X Article). When the former Indochina was partitioned into North and South, the U.S. priority was supporting whoever would best limit Northern Communist expansion. Self-determination, true democracy, and other high values for the people of South Vietnam were simply not serious considerations, especially with some of the more politically influential supporters of the strongly anticommunist Catholic leaders in the south. These leaders centered around Ngo Dinh Diem and, indirectly, his family; the supporters included Francis Cardinal Spellman and the Kennedy family.

North Vietnamese decision to expand, 1959

In the late Eisenhower administration, the U.S. was quietly concerned with the expansion of North Vietnam. Although it is somewhat unclear when the U.S. firmly knew of the North Vietnamese decision to take control of the south, it is now known that the key decision was made in May 1959, the date commemorated in the name of the 559th Transportation Group, established to build what was to become the Ho Chi Minh trail. Additional transportation groups were created for maritime supply to the South: Group 759 ran sea-based operations, while Group 959 supplied the Pathet Lao by land routes.

It was the Pathet Lao that most concerned the Eisenhower Administration. In 1959, clandestine military advisors were sent to Laos, under a program originally called Operation Hotfoot. Brigadier General John Heintges, headed the "Program Evaluation Office", the cover name for the program.

This concern, with Laos rather than South Vietnam, continued into the first years of the Kennedy Administration. The Kennedy and Diem families had had a relationship going back to the mid-fifties. The National Security Agency set up a 24-hour monitoring watch on Laos and Thailand.

John F. Kennedy, however, also became concerned with South Vietnam, and started to send advisors. This appealed to strongly anticommunist parts of the U.S. political system, but was not widely publicized. Compared with organized Eastern European and Cuban exiles in the U.S., there was little widespread constituency in the U.S. for any of Southeast Asia.

Gradual U.S. commitment

In the early sixties, the U.S. continued to provide advisors and supplies. The U.S. established signals intelligence facilities in the South, and the first American fatality was a member of an intelligence unit. While the South Vietnamese were taught some basic signals intelligence techniques, the more sensitive collection and analysis techniques were not shared, only the conclusions.

Major U.S. involvement begins

Psychologically, the Vietnam War was almost as traumatic as the Civil War. It is still a painful memory and the subject of ill-tempered debates regarding victory and defeat, imperialism and Communism, good intentions and limited resources, deceit and patriotism.

In the tradition of U.S. wars, the conflict was generally seen more in political than military terms; there was an expectation that defeat of the enemy main force would cause the collapse of their cause.

Misinformation abounds on the topic — many have the idea that the United States Army was defeated in combat by a Viet Cong guerrilla force — something that definitely did not happen. United States military forces left the Republic of Vietnam under the civilian control of the military, and at the orders of a U.S. government that recognized American public opinion did not regard the survival of South Vietnam as a critical issue.

Several other factors were important in the formation of public opinion. This was the first war to have near-real-time battle footage televised to the American public. It was also a time of much general social change, from the civil rights movement to increased drug use to "free love" to the assassination of several charismatic leaders.

A social revolution saw many people (especially blacks, students and feminists) in revolt against tight restrictive rules and roles that confined individuals into boxes of race, gender, age and class. Favorite targets of the revolt included all traditional sources of order, discipline and hierarchy, such as the police, the military, and the government itself.

While the United States lost none of the battles, it lost the war because it did not define reachable political goals. From 1945 to 1964, people with expertise in the area, but with no special ornithological definition, argued about the proper role of the United States in the region, and about the viability of the Republic of Vietnam.

From 1964 to 1972 debate raged between "doves" (who wanted the US to cut its losses and get out) and "hawks" (who wanted to win, for some definition of "win"). Speaking of wars in general,

Nothing is more divisive for a government than having to make peace at the price of major concessions. The proces of ending a war almost inevitably invokes an intense internal struggle if it means abandoning an ally or giving up popularly accepted objectives...the power structure of a government is not made of one piece — even in dictatorships. Political factions contend for influence, government agencies and military service maintain their own separate loyalties and pursue partisan objectives, and popular support keeps shifting. — Fred Charles Iklé, pp. 59-60

Many believe victory, although the criteria for "victory" were never clearly defined, was thrown away because, as General Hamilton H. Howze said when Saigon finally fell to the Communists in 1975, "America itself lost much of its will to fight and the politicians and the press began their program of vilification." Howze's rhetoric says more about the military's role in society and its own battered self image than it does about Vietnam. Much of the intensity of the debate during the 1960s sprang not from what was happening in Asia, but what was happening on the home front.

A comment from one mid-level soldier, to become an apparently victorious commander in a later war, may be illustrative. A lieutenant colonel hospitalized for back surgery at the time, wrote (his emphasis)

I hated what Vietnam was doing to the United States and I hated what it was doing to the Army. It was a nightmare that the American public had withdrawn its support: our troops in World War I and World War II had never had to doubt for one minute that the people on the home front were fully behind them. We in the military hadn't chosen the enemy or written the orders — our elected leaders had. Nevertheless, we were taking much of the blame. — H Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., , p. 181

COL (ret.) Harry Summers, a strategic analyst and author, observed that the protest movement was directed not at the civilian makers of policy, but at the uniformed executors of policy. Other soldiers, however, have described the U.S. involvement as essentially in support of U.S. domestic political agendas, starting from a reflexive, Eisenhower-Dulles militant anticommunism.

The Vietnam War inevitably became the target of opportunity. The history of the small war is unusually complicated because it lasted so long, involved so many twists and turns of policy and strategy. The turnover of Americans was unusually high (2.5 million were stationed there), so that the many veterans each have a different story to tell.