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The '''Vietnam War''' was a mid-20th century struggle between the [[Communist Party of Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]], the [[United States]], and, depending on when the war is thought to have begun, [[France]]. It is correct to say that there were varying levels of warfare, or covert preparations, between 1945 and 1975. These do break into at least two hot wars, one against the French colonial administration, and one primarily between the Communist north and non-Communist south. The United States and other countries, especially in the latter war, were involved, sometimes intensely.
{{Image|Vietnam_War_Memorial_Washington_DC_Maya_Lin.jpg|right|300px|The revered [[Washington, D.C.]] Vietnam Veterans Memorial designed by [[Wikipedia|Maya Lin]]}}
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The '''Vietnam War''' (1955-1975) was an international [[Cold War]] conflict that killed 3.8 million people, in which [[North Vietnam/Definition|North Vietnam]] and its allies fought [[United States of America|U.S.]] forces and eventually took over [[South Vietnam]], forming a single Communist country, [[Vietnam]].  


This is not to suggest that 1945-1975 was the only conflict seen in the region. A Japanese invasion in 1941 triggered U.S. export embargoes to Japan, which affected the Japanese decision to attack Western countries in December 1941. Vietnamese nationalism goes back through the first French presence, but there was opposition to Chinese influence dating back to the Two Trung Sisters in the first century A.D.  
==Impact on American culture==
A significant portion of [[Baby Boom|Baby Boomers]], the U.S. generation who were young during the protracted Vietnam War, grew up seeing continual bloody footage of active combat on television every nightAs the war progressed, an avalanche of young people in the U.S. protested against the war, resulting in considerable domestic turmoil.  The protests were in part because of the military draft that sent unwilling young men to their likely death or maiming, but also in part because young people did not see the aims of the war as worth the cost. This pitted the young across the nation against the [[World War II]] generation, who viewed encroachments by Communists during the Cold War as an important continuation of the wars fought by the U.S. since 1940.  To prevent protests during the [[Iraq War]], the U.S. military stopped allowing TV journalists to film actual combat.<ref>It's worth mentioning that, in addition to banning TV from showing film of combat, the U.S. military also tried to reduce the number of deaths during the Iraq War with improved medical triage. The result was that, though more soldiers survived, many of them returned home with severe disablement, including especially lots of brain injuries which meant they would likely be dependent for life on care by their families.</ref> 


In English-speaking circles, it is said to have begun in 1954 or 1959 and ended in 1975.<ref>For example, the ''[[Encyclopedia Britannica]]'' puts the starting year at 1954 or 1955, while ''[[Encarta]]'' puts it at 1959.  Many historians date it earlier, to include what some call the "[[First Indochina War]]," but this usage is not widely known or followed by the general public.</ref> Nevertheless, the following article follows a common usage by historians, to cover a two-part conflict that began in 1945 and ended in 1975From the perspective of the Vietnamese, the war was the military effort of the Communist Party of Vietnam under [[Ho Chi Minh]] to defeat France (1946-54), and the same party, now in control of [[North Vietnam]], to overthrow the government of South Vietnam (1958-75) and take control of the whole country, in the face of military intervention by the United States (1964-72).  
Because the U.S. lost the Vietnam War, by the 1980's it became unpopular even to refer to it, and the press began avoiding the topic, while surviving veterans went without adequate benefits for post-traumatic treatment and, unable to cope with life, became homeless by the thousands.  This phenomenon was the main subject of [[Wikipedia:Sylvester Stallone|Sylvester Stallone]]'s 1982 action film [[Wikipedia:First Blood|First Blood]], which was panned by critics as too violent even though only a single person died (due to his own stupidity)Several subsequent Stallone films about First Blood's main character, Rambo, were indeed mindlessly violent, unlike the original film, which was conceived and written by Stallone (who played Rambo) in protest for public abandonment of Vietnam veteransThis film also depicted the aftermath of U.S. military having sprayed the jungles of Vietnam with [[Agent Orange]], a herbicide containing dioxin which resulted in many exposed soldiers and civilians later getting cancer, the horror of which had barely begun to be recognized by the public in 1982.  The only prior major film about the Vietnam War was Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 ''Apocalypse Now'', an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's story “Heart of Darkness” to Vietnam. Coppola's film was indeed violent, a direct and nightmarish depiction of the devastation of war, but critics praised it, and it won multiple awards, in contrast to Stallone's ''First Blood'' which had touched a nerve with its social criticism of American culture.


==Summary==
==Strategic Summary==
===Name===
The war had four distinct periods characterized by the nature of the conflict and the nationality of the combatants: a period of civil war (1957-1964), the Americanization (1964-1969), the Vietnamization (1969-1973), and the end (1974-1975).  
In terms of terminology, over 90% of civilian and military writers and analysts use "Vietnam War" but some use "First Indochina War" (for 1946-54, when the French played a major role) and "Second Indochina War" (for 1954-75, when the U.S. played a major role). <ref>William J. Duiker, ''Vietnam: Nation in Revolution,'' (1983) uses First and Second, pp. 43, 53; also William S. Turley, ''The Second Indochina War: A Short Political and Military History, 1954-1975'' (1986). In terms of scholarly articles in refereed journals, 94% of article titles and abstracts in one database search used "Vietnam War" while only 6% used "Indochina War."  Such searches admittedly do not establish whether historians are using "Vietnam War" to name a conflict that began in 1945, however.</ref>
===Expelling the French===
The first stage, 1946-1954, or '''First Indochina War''' involved driving out the French colonial power. During that period, the Communist-dominated military wing of the anticolonialist force was called the Viet Minh, which had earlier fought the Japanese who had invaded in 1941. The U.S. became deeply involved from 1950, and soon was paying for 90% of the French effort.  


In 1954 Vietnam was split into the [[Democratic Republic of Vietnam]] (DRV) (Communist North Vietnam}, and the [[Republic of Vietnam]] (RVN) (South Vietnam, supported by the United States).  The U.S. its first military advisers to train the South's army (ARVN) in 1955. The first U.S. military advisor accompanying combat troops, as well as covert combat fighting began in Laos, covertly in 1959 and more overtly in 1961; the first American soldier was killed in 1962. There had been covert political operations and preparation for guerilla warfare prior to partition in 1954, and observers of the colonial and anticolonial factions in 1945.
The Vietnam War originated from the unresolved antagonisms implicit in the Geneva Accords (1954) and French and U.S. [[Cold War]] ambitions, namely to [[Containment policy|"contain" the spread of communism]].  The Geneva Accords promised elections in 1956 to determine a national government for a united [[Vietnam]].  Neither the United States government nor Ngo Dinh Diem's State of Vietnam signed anything at the 1954 Geneva Conference. With respect to the question of reunification, the non-communist Vietnamese delegation objected strenuously to any division of Vietnam, but lost out when the French accepted the proposal of Viet Minh delegate Pham Van Dong,<ref>''The Pentagon Papers'' (1971), Beacon Press, vol. 3, p. 134.</ref> who proposed that Vietnam eventually be united by elections under the supervision of "local commissions".<ref>''The Pentagon Papers'' (1971), Beacon Press, vol. 3, p. 119.</ref> The United States countered with what became known as the "American Plan," with the support of South Vietnam and the United Kingdom.<ref>''The Pentagon Papers'' (1971), Beacon Press, vol. 3, p. 140.</ref> It provided for unification elections under the supervision of the [[United Nations]], but was rejected by the Soviet delegation and North Vietnamese.<ref>''The Pentagon Papers'' (1971), Beacon Press, vol. 3, p. 140.</ref>
 
War between North and South began in the late 1950s when the Communists used supporters in the South, officially called the "National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam" or "National Liberation Front" (NLF)<ref name=Pike>{{citation
| title = Viet Cong
| first = Douglas | last = Pike
| publisher = MIT
| year = 1966}}</ref> (the term "Viet Cong" was widely used but considered derogatory by the NLF)  to destabilize and overthrow the government. For a time, the NLF did have noncommunist leadership, primarily as figureheads. The term VC, however, most precisely referred to the military wing of the NLF, a common practice in [[insurgency|insurgencies]], as with, the somewhat oversimplified example of [[Sinn Fein]] and the [[Irish Republican Army]]
 
In South Vietnam, there was a gradual evolution from early military advice, trying to build a conventional military rather like that of South Korea, and then various kinds of [[counterinsurgency]] advice and assistance.  In Vietnam proper, American advisors began accompanying RVN troops into battle in 1962-1963, most visibly at the [[Battle of Ap Bac]] in January 1963. U.S. began to bring in combat troops with a limited mission of protecting advisors. While there had been covert operations against North Vietnam well before, the first overt attack by U.S. air came in August 1964, in response to the [[Gulf of Tonkin incident]]. By 1965, U.S. combat aircraft were in the RVN, with battalion-strength units providing ground security. Larger units began operations in mid-1965.
 
The U.S. moved from financial aid and advice (before 1964), to large scale military involvement, beginning 1965, to save the government in the South in order to maintain the credibility of its Cold War policy of containment. At first, American involvement was through the embassy staff, but military involvement grew. First, a Military Assistance & Advisory Group was formed, one for Indochina and then one for Vietnam.  When U.S. combat and combat support troops became directly involved, the [[Military Assistance Command, Vietnam]], was created as a major command, a "sub-unified command" of the [[United States Pacific Command]]. There continued to be diplomatic, foreign aid (U.S. [[Agency for International Development]]), and [[CIA activities in Vietnam|Central Intelligence Agency]] linkages; coordinating the many U.S. and other country agencies became immensely complex.
 
The U.S. sent in over 500,000 troops (about a fifth in combat roles, the rest in support roles), in addition to many others at airbases in Thailand and elsewhere. Over 2.5 million Americans rotated through Vietnam, usually on a strict 365-day policy.
 
As the U.S. involvement increased, so did the effect of the war on U.S. domestic politics, as well as on both U.S. and Vietnamese relationships with the allies of both. Vietnam-related conflict had a direct relationship to [[Lyndon Baines Johnson]] not seeking re-election, and for the 1968 Presidential victory of [[Republican]] [[Richard Nixon]] over [[Democrat]] [[Hubert Humphrey]], Johnson's Vice President.
 
Compared to the [[Korean War]] or [[Gulf War]], which were authorized by the [[United Nations]], there was relatively little multinational oversight. An [[International Control Commission]], formed by the 1954 Geneva conference, provided some communications between the sides, but had little effect. The ICC members were [[Canada]], [[India]] and [[Poland]].
===1968-75===
Massive American firepower significantly weakened the NLF, which in the "Tet Offensive" February 1968 made an all-out effort to attack government offices throughtout the South. The NFL was beaten back everywhere, and virtually destroyed as an operating unit.  From then on Hanoi used it own PAVN regular soldiers.  The North was aided by China and the Soviet Union; the South was aided by the U.S., South Korea, Australia and other countries.  [[Thailand]] and the Philippines provided major American air bases. 
 
Tet had a devastating impact on U.S. President [[Lyndon B. Johnson]], who had tried to keep the war quiet so it would not interfere with the [[Great Society]] domestic programs.  Anti-war protests, led by university students,  escalated in the U.S. and worldwide, reaching a climax in 1968. Republican [[Richard Nixon]] was elected president and in 1969 he began to "Vietnamize" the war by turning the fighting over to the South Vietnamese military, and systematically withdrew American forces. Virtually all U.S. soldiers were gone by 1971, but the U.S. Air Force played a major role in 1972 in stopping a large-scale Communist invasion from North Vietnam, and in bombing campaigns against Hanoi. After years of negotiations in Paris, peace was signed in January 1973. All the American POW's were released, and all American forces removed from Vietnam, although large-scale shipment of military supplies continued. 
 
In 1975 the North Vietnamese army invaded and conquered South Vietnam. The U.S. did not intervene, but did rescue many Vietnamese supporters.  The conquest was a major defeat for the American Cold War policy of containment of Communist expansion, but under Nixon and his top adviser [[Henry Kissinger]] the U.S. had turned away from containment toward détente  with China and the Soviet Union.
 
Estimates of total casualties, 1960-75, vary widely. Of the Americans, 31,000 died in combat (not counting accidents), of whom 66% were from the Army, 26% Marines, 4% Navy, and 4% Air Force. South Vietnam suffered at least 110,000 soldiers killed in action, plus at least 400,000 civilians. 4400 soldiers from South Korea were killed, along with 423 from Australia, 351 from Thailand, and 83 from New Zealand. Estimates of the deaths of Communist soldiers have run from 670,000 to 1.1 million.<ref> Spencer C. Tucker, "Casualties," in Tucker, ed. ''Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War'' (2001) [http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0195135253/ref=sib_dp_srch_bod?v=search-inside&keywords=casualties&go.x=6&go.y=14&go=Go!# p. 64 online]</ref> 
 
After the defeat of the South in 1975 a million Vietnam refugees fled to the U.S.  The war spilled over into [[Laos]] and [[Cambodia]], which came under Communist control in 1975Otherwise, the long-feared "domino effect" whereby other countries in the region would turn Communist, did not happen.
 
Nixon shifted American foreign policy away from containment to détente with China and the Soviet Union, and they in turn reduced their support for the North. Vietnam was united under Communist control but in 1979 China and Vietnam fought a border war. In the U.S., bitter, even violent debates inside the Democratic Party cost it the presidency.  The war, deeply impressed upon the American psyche, became a defining moment for American politics, diplomacy, military policy and popular culture.
 
==American perspective==
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. Misinformation abounds on the topic &mdash; many have the idea that the United States Army was defeated in combat by a Viet Cong guerrilla force &mdash; something that definitely did not happen. <!--Commented out "this article is primarily from a U.S. perspective." If it continues to be so, retitle it "U.S. perspective on the Vietnam war.-->
 
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. The social revolt of the 1960s was by no means limited to the US--parallel upheavals took place in Europe, Japan, and even China.<ref>See Jeremi Suri, ''Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente'' (2005) [http://www.amazon.com/Power-Protest-Global-Revolution-Detente/dp/0674017633/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/103-4827826-5463040?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191639845&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]</ref>
 
While the United States lost none of the battles, it lost the war as it had completely lost sight that winning wars is ultimately political. 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"). 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. Speaking of wars in general, {{quotation|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 &mdash; 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, <ref name=Ikle>{{citation
|title = Every War Must End, revised edition
| first = Fred Charles | last =Iklé
| publisher = Columbia University Press|year = 1991}}</ref> 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)
{{quotation|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 &mdash; our elected leaders had. Nevertheless, we were taking much of the blame. |H Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., <ref name=Schwarzkopf1992>{{citation
| first = H Norman, Jr. | last = Schwarzkopf
| title = It Doesn't Take a Hero
| publisher = Bantam
| year = 1992}}</ref>, 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. <ref name=Summers>{{citation
| title=On Strategy: a Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War
| first = Harry G., Jr. | last = Summers
| publisher = Presidio | year = 1995}}</ref> 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. <ref name=McMaster>{{citation
| first = H.R. | last = McMaster
| title = Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam
| publisher = Harper | year = 1998}}</ref>
 
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.
==Origins==
To appreciate the complexity it is necessary to start with French colonialism in the 19th century, or, quite possibly, to go to Vietnamese drives for independence in the 1st century, with the Trung Sisters' revolt against the Chinese; the citation here mentions the 1968th anniversary of their actions.<ref name=>{{citation
| title =Ha Noi celebrates Trung sisters 1,968th anniversary
| date = 14 March 2008
| url = http://www.vietnamnews.com.vn/showarticle.php?num=02CUL140308
| journal = Viet Nam News}}</ref>
 
===French Indochina Background===
In the late 19th century the French expanded their global empire to southeast Asia, by acquiring control of Vietnam, and the neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos. The Chinese war lords who had been in charge were expelled, replaced by a French governor supported by rotating units of the French army and several thousand French civil servants. Few Frenchmen permanently settled in Indochina. Below the top layer of imperial control, the civil service comprised French-speaking Catholic Vietnamese; a nominal "Emperor" resided in Hue. Paris had hoped to make a profit from its empire, but instead the expenses of building roads, railroads, ports, utilities, schools and other infrastructure, not to mention the military and civil service salaries, far outpaced the modest profits from rice and rubber exports. Little industry developed and 80% of the population lived in villages of about 2000 population; they depended on rice growing. Most were nominally Buddhist; about 10% were Catholic. Minorities included the Chinese merchants who controlled most of the commerce, and Montagnard tribesmen in the thinly populated Central Highlands. Vietnam was a relatively peaceful colony; sporadic independence movements were quickly suppressed by the efficient French secret police.
 
[[Ho Chi Minh]] (1890–1969) and fellow students founded the Vietnamese Communist Party party in Paris in 1929, but it was of marginal importance until World War II.<ref>By the 1960s, Ho was primarily a symbol rather than an active leader. William J. Duiker, ''Ho Chi Minh: A Life'' (2000) </ref> In 1940 and 1941 the Vichy regime yielded control of Vietnam to the Japanese, and Ho returned to lead an underground independence movement (which received a little assistance from the O.S.S., the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency [[CIA]]).<ref name=Patti>{{cite book
| title = Why Viet Nam?: Prelude to America's Albatross
| author = Patti, Archimedes L. A
| publisher = University of California Press  
| year = 1980
| ISBN-10 = 0520041569
}}</ref> 
 
President [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] (in office 1933-45) detested French colonialism, but [[Harry S. Truman]] (in office 1945-53)  was more interested in helping restore French prestige in Europe, so he helped them to return in 1946. In contrast with other Asian colonies like India, Burma, the Philippines and Korea, Vietnam was not given its independence after the war. As in Indonesia (the Dutch East Indies), an indigenous rebellion demanded independence. While the Netherlands was too weak to resist the Indonesians, the French were strong enough to just barely hold on. As a result Ho and his Viet Minh<ref>Originally a Communist-led  anti-Japanese insurgency, such as the Hukbalahap in the Phillipines. Unfortunately, Vietnam had no [[Ramon Magsaysay]] to form a unity government</ref> launched a guerrilla campaign, using Communist China as a sanctuary when French pursuit became hot. When the [[Korean War]] erupted in 1950, and [[NSC-68]] redefined American objectives, Washington saw Vietnam as another target of Communist expansion, and began to fund about three-fourths of the French military efforts. However, the goals of Washington and Paris were incompatible. Washington wanted a democratic Vietnam independent of both France and Communism, while Paris was more interested in restoring its old empire than in fighting Communism. In 1950 the U.S. officially recognized the theoretical independence of the "State of Vietnam," even though Paris kept control of its foreign and military policy.
 
===Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Accords, 1954===
To cut Viet Minh supply lines from China, the French built a fort at remote [[Dien Bien Phu]]. In 1954, 12,000 defenders were surrounded and battered by General [[Vo Nguyen Giap]] (1911- ), who were surprised by the enemy's artillery, supplied by China but carried by human porters over seemingly impassible terrain. <ref> Cecil B. Currey, ''Victory at Any Cost: The Genius of Viet Nam's Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap'' (2005)</ref> Paris begged Washington for air strikes. The US Navy wanted to send its aircraft carriers into action but the US Army demurred, arguing it would be "a dangerous strategic diversion of limited U.S. military capabilities... [to] a non-decisive theatre." For the Army, containment meant holding back the Russian divisions in central Europe, not chasing guerrillas in Asian jungles. President [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]] (in office 1953-61), the man who led the war against Germany in 1944-45 and who commanded NATO in 1950, agreed with the Army. With the Korean stalemate resolved only a few months earlier, he rejected the advice of hawkish aides (including Vice President [[Richard Nixon]]) and refused to fight another land war in Asia.   
 
Dien Bien Phu surrendered, the French government collapsed, and a Socialist government with Communist support came to power in Paris, pledged to get out of Vietnam in 30 days. The American policy of bankrolling the French had failed.  At the 1954 [[Geneva Conference]], the French signed agreements with the Viet Minh that amounted to a surrender; the French did not consult the government in Saigon. Because of American pressure, however, Paris did not give Ho Chi Minh all he demanded (he demanded all of Vietnam). A permanent cease fire was promised, and the country was split along the 17th parallel, with the north turned over to Ho's [[Democratic Republic of Vietnam]] (DRV). The French promised to leave the southern half, which for the time being would continue as the independent State of Vietnam with the Emperor as head of state and a Catholic anti-communist as premier. The Geneva Accords called for "free general elections by secret ballot" in 1956 to unify the country. Washington and Saigon both rejected the Geneva Accords: they were both determined to build an independent, anti-Communist South Vietnam, but, in the militant anticommunism of the time, a democratic Vietnam was not a priority.
 
Some observers thought Ho was so popular for having driven the French out that he might have won a free election in the South in 1956. Antiwar critics years later said that the South Vietnam regime was inherently illegitimate because it did not abide by the election clause in the Accords. These critics said that since Ho Chi Minh “might” have won a hypothetical free election, therefore he represented true democracy.
 
What the critics missed was that these hypothetical free elections were quite impossible in 1954, or 1956 or any other time, because the Communists would never permit free campaigning against Communism, and  the southern leader, [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] (1901-63) refused to hold free and honest elections in the Republic of Vietnam. Neither side holding power was interested in democratic reform.
 
Ho's DRV was totally controlled by Communist cadres which systematically tracked down and imprisoned or executed all its critics, village by village, street by street. In 1956 instead of holding an election in the North, Ho used his army to suppress peasants who protested "land reform"; thousands were shot.
 
Diem demonstrated no real understanding of democracy, and kept power with the Catholic minority. Increasingly bitter interactions with a Buddhist opposition led to a crisis in 1963, with iconic images of monks burning themselves alive in protest. Eventually, Diem was overthrown by a military coup, but, while there was a parliament, general democratic governement never emerged. Neither Diem nor DRV never intended to hold free elections in 1956, and never before or since has held any.
 
===Promoting the Diem Regime, 1954-63=== 
The United States rejected the Geneva Accords as a violation of the principles of self determination and containment. It worked to build up the new, independent nation of South Vietnam (SVN), by funding local and national economic and administrative infrastructures. In July 1954 Ngo Dinh Diem became premier in Saigon.
 
Diem and his powerful brothers were nationalists who were both anti-French, of an authoritarian Mandarin/Confucianist ethos and anticommunist. As leaders of the  Catholic minority, they won considerable sympathy and support in the  Catholic anticommunist circles in the US, notably from [[Francis Cardinal Spellman]] of New York and the [[Kennedy family]]. As soon as the Communists came to power in the North, some 800,000 refugees (mostly Catholic) fled to South Vietnam. They provided most of the leadership and support for its government (GVN) and its army (ARVN), in part because the Diem government discriminated against mainstream Buddhists and various Vietnamese sects, such as the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao. American financial aid and military advisors replaced the French, and SVN under Diem took its place among the world's newly independent nations. 
 
The Eisenhower Administration, eager to formalize the containment system by treaty, in 1954 set up the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). The US promised to aid SEATO signatories that were attacked by a Communist power. The French (still committed to the Geneva Accords) vetoed membership for SVN. To get around this French veto, Washington had inserted in the Treaty a vague protocol that seemed to give Saigon some sort of guarantee, even though it was not allowed to sign the Treaty or become part of SEATO. Furthermore, Eisenhower decided not to sign a mutual defense treaty with SVN in order to avoid over-commitment. Instead the US relied on the highly ambiguous SEATO Treaty, which was ratified by the Senate with little discussion of Vietnam. By default it became the chief legal base for US involvement in Vietnam, until the subsequent Congressional resolution granted to Lyndon Johnson in response to the claim that the North Vietnamese had attacked U.S. Navy vessels in the [[Gulf of Tonkin incident]].
 
In 1960, Eisenhower had 900 American advisors in SVN to bring its army up to what were perceived as basic standards, against the sort of conventional invasion launched by North Korea in 1950. That same year Hanoi's ruling Politburo established the "National Liberation Front" (NLF) as its political arm in the South, and the "Viet Cong" as  the military arm. The rank and file were southerners, the leadership was northern. The Viet Cong tactics were based on guerrilla strikes that would assassinate local officials and village leaders favorable to Saigon, occasionally attack an isolated ARVN detachment, and when needed seize ("tax") village food stocks or kidnap ("draft") young men. The Communist goal was "liberation" of the South from capitalism and westernism. The NLF had a few shadow formations in the cities, where it did poorly; the leadership of the Johnson Administration was baffled why it did so well in the countryside.
 
Defense Secretary [[Robert S. McNamara]] (in office 1961-68) told President [[John F. Kennedy]] (in office 1961-63) in 1961 it was "absurd to think that a nation of 20 million people can be subverted by 15-20 thousand active guerrillas if the government and the people of that country do not wish to be subverted."<ref> Rusk/McNamara memorandum.Nov. 11, 1961, [http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon2/pent3.htm online at ''Pentagon Papers'']</ref>  McNamara, a manufacturing executive and expert in statistical management, had no background in [[guerilla warfare]], and rejected advice from area specialists and military officers, preferring to consult with his personal team, often called the "Whiz Kids". His key foreign policy advisor was a law professor, John McNaughton, while economist Alain Enthoven was perhaps his closest colleague.
 
===Weaknesses of South Vietnam===
Just as Diem's government (GVN) was factionalized and inefficient, its army, the ARVN, was a typical third world operation based on patronage, favoritism, and corruption. Commands and promotions went to political insiders, regardless of their competence or (more often) incompetence. Food, uniforms, munitions and information were sold for cash. Intrigue was the game, and the generals usually spent most of their time on politics rather than command. Few senior officers had any real military training. Draftees did not want to fight any more than their officers did. Although hardware was abundant and of good quality, training was mediocre, food and pay were unattractive, and morale was poor. Desertion rates were high (home was nearby); this hardly upset the officers because they kept the absent soldiers on the rolls and pocketed their paychecks.<ref> Robert K. Brigham, ''ARVN: Life And Death in the South Vietnamese Army'' (2006)</ref>
 
Diem (and his successors) were primarily interested in using the ARVN as a device to secure power, rather than as a tool to unify the nation and defeat its enemies. Despite monumental American efforts from 1960 through 1972, the situation never decisively improved. Saigon would ultimately lose the war because its large and very well equipped army lacked spirit, motivation and patriotism.
 
===Viet Cong guerrillas and regular North Vietnam Army===
The North on the other hand, fine tuned its military forces into a powerful political instrument, as well as developing military capabilities appropriate to the particular time. In the Maoist doctrine of protracted war, somewhat ironically, the final "Phase III" offensive was by conventional forces, the sort that the U.S. had tried to build a defense against when the threat was from guerrillas. [[T-54]] [[tank (military)|tank]]s that broke down the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon were not driven by ragged guerrillas.
 
In the Viet Cong, and in the North Vietnam regular army (PAVN), every unit down to the company level had a cadre of political officers who monitored ideological correctness on a daily basis. Insubordination was impossible. The Viet Cong had many unwilling draftees of its own; tens of thousands deserted to the government, which promised them protection. The Viet Cong executed deserters if it could, and threatened their families, all the while closely monitoring the ranks for any sign of defeatism or deviation from the party line.<ref> Pike, ''PAVN'' (1986)</ref>
In December 1963, a decisive meeting of the Communist Party (VWF) Central Committee in Hanoi set basic policy. Le Duan (1907-86) was in full control.  Overruling Giap (who wanted to build up the regular army), and Ho (who, like the Soviets, did not want to antagonize the U.S.), Le Duan and the new leadership decided that the government of South Vietnam was on the verge of collapse. They escalated NLF attacks, but did not send regular troops. At thes time the Soviet Union and China were bitterly contesting control of the Communist movement worldwide. Hanoi's decision marked a decisive break with the Soviets, who had recommended that instead of overthrowing the South and risking a major war with the U.S., it was better to concentrate on rapid development of the poverty-striken economy of North Vietnam.<ref> Although still nominal president, Ho Chi Minh was a powerless figurehead. William J. Duiker, ''Ho Chi Minh: A Life'' (2001), [http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/078688701X/ref=sib_dp_bod_toc?ie=UTF8&p=S009# pp 534-37 online];  Ilya Gaiduk, ''Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954-1963''
(2003) [http://books.google.com/books?id=TAfATu5SF-cC&pg=PA203&dq=%22central+committee%22+%22le+duan%22+plenum+1963&sig=ACfU3U29FH06x6M65aOmfA6HfKSv0p8fsQ online pp 203-4]</ref>
 
 
From 1959 to the end of 1963, more than 40,000 PAVN troops, primarily soldiers born in South Vietnam who had gone north, were sent back to South Vietnam. Included were 2,000 senior and midlevel officers (field grade and above) and technical personnel. As of 1963, they constituted, half the full-time soldiers and 80% of the officers and technical cadres in command and leadership organizations of the Communist army in South Vietnam. To provide logistic support from 1961 through 1963, Group 559 (the [[Ho Chi Minh Trail]] command] transported to the South 165,600 weapons of all types, including artillery, mortars, and anti-aircraft machine guns. In addition in 1962-63, Sea Infiltration Group 759, using transport vessels camouflaged as fishing junks, delivered 25 shiploads totaling 1,430 tons of weapons and ammunition to covert docks and landing sites in the Mekong Delta and in the coastal provinces east of Saigon.
    
    
==Increased U.S. combat role==
Due to the stalemate, North Vietnam created two organizations. The [[National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam]] (NLF) was a political organization to establish civil government for the South Vietnamese regions controlled by its military arm, the [[Viet Cong]] (VC).  The political/military actions of the NLF and VC against the Diem regime in South Vietnam, and Diem's escalation against the NLF/VC, essentially started a civil war. The climatic event of the civil war period was the Buddhist crisis in 1963 ending in the assassination of Ngo by a [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA-backed]] operation authorized by President Kennedy.
It was the position of the Johnson Administration that the entire opposition was organized and directed by Hanoi, a position consistent with the strict Communist vs. anti-Communist view of the fifties. This view, at times, may have interfered with pressuring for reforms in the South Vietnamese government, such as removing inefficient officers with good political connections, and reducing corruption.  


With the [[Gulf of Tonkin resolution]] as authority, the U.S. sent more and more combat units into South Vietnam, also bringing in allied nations. In some cases, such as with the excellent South Korean troops, the U.S. paid their expenses.  
Americanization of the war began by the [[Lyndon B. Johnson|Johnson Administration]] in 1964 following the [[Gulf of Tonkin Incident]].  The U.S. began sending ground combat troops in 1965, and troop strength continued to escalate through 1968.  The climatic event during the Americanization period was the [[Tet Offensive]].  Following a change in presidential administrations in the 1968 election, [[Richard M. Nixon|President Nixon]] followed a strategy of de-escalation and "[[Vietnamization]]" of the conflict, while also escalating the conflict through incursions into Cambodia and Laos, and bombings of North Vietnam.  At various times, the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces were joined by [[Republic of Korea|South Korean]], [[Philippines|Filipino]], [[New Zealand]], [[Thailand|Thai]] and [[Australia|Australian]] troops.  


The Administration also was of the position that any Communist government was unacceptable, and was dismissive of any neutralist roles. Other than a general fear of Communist expansion, no U.S. administration clearly articulated a direct threat to the U.S. that justified large-scale U.S. land involvement in Asia. For some policymakers, the general threat was sufficient reason. For others, as seen in the McNaughton memo, it was more that the U.S. had no clean way to reduce its involvement without harming its "role as a guarantor".Perhaps the most telling document of the lack of strategic vision of McNamara and his staff was a 1965 memorandum from McNaughton, attempting to define goals. McNaughton defined the U.S. aims as:
As Vietnamization went into effect, and the [[Paris Peace Talks]] completed in 1972, the U.S. role changed again [[South Vietnam's ground war, 1972-1975|South Vietnam fought its own ground war]], with U.S. ground combat troops withdrawing between 1968 and 1972, with the last air attacks in 1972. After that, the U.S. provided limited replacements of supplies, and maintained a large, diplomatic Defense Attache Office that monitored the RVN until the [[fall of South Vietnam]] in 1975.  
*"70%--To avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor).
*20%--To keep SVN (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands.
*10%--To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life. Also-To emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used. Not--To "help a friend," although it would be hard to stay if asked out." <ref name=McNaughton>{{citation
| first = John T. | last = McNaughton
| title =  Paper Prepared by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (McNaughton): Action for South Vietnam
| volume = Foreign Relations of the United States, "McNaughton Paper 1965 - FRUS
193"
| date = 10 March 1965
  | url = http://vietnam.vassar.edu/ladrang03.html}}</ref>


Note that generic anticommunism was not an objective, and the welfare of South Vietnam was low on the list. McNaughton's emphasis on Chinese domination ignored a history of Vietnamese enmity to the Chinese, going back to the revolt of the Two Trung Sisters in the first century A.D. North Vietnam was Stalinist, not Maoist, and far more a Soviet than Chinese client.  
After the U.S. withdrawal, [[fall of South Vietnam| South Vietnam collapsed]] after being invaded by the DRV in 1975. Memorable pictures of desperate people clinging to helicopters reflect the evacuation of diplomatic, military, and intelligence personnel, and some Vietnamese allies. Other than for the immediate security of the evacuation, no U.S. combat troops or aircraft had been in South Vietnam since 60 days after the signing of the [[Paris Peace Talks|peace treaty in Paris]].


The Johnson Administration always insisted that aggression was organized and directed by Hanoi; it rejected arguments by opponents of intervention in Vietnam that Hanoi was innocent, or intermediate positions that there were southern dissidents used by the North. U.S. opposition had no single cause, but one theme was that it was extremely unwise to become involved in a land war in Asia, with no critical U.S. interests at stake. Others, perhaps more naive, saw it as purely a civil war.  
The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities.  The most detailed demographic study calculated 791,000 to 1,141,000 war-related deaths for all of Vietnam,<ref>Charles Hirschman et al., "Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate," Population and Development Review, December 1995.</ref> while the Vietnamese government claimed that over 3 million Vietnamese died during the conflict.<ref name="afp1995">{{cite news |title=20 Years After Victory, Vietnamese Communists Ponder How to Celebrate |author=Philip Shenon|first=Philip |last=Shenon |url=http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/23/world/20-years-after-victory-vietnamese-communists-ponder-how-to-celebrate.html |date=23 April 1995 |newspaper=[[The New York Times]] |accessdate=24 February 2011 }}</ref><ref>Associated Press, 3 April 1995, "Vietnam Says 1.1 Million Died Fighting For North."</ref>  195,000-430,000 South Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref name="Lewy">Lewy, Guenter (1978). ''America in Vietnam''. New York: Oxford University Press. Appendix 1, pp.450-453</ref><ref>Thayer, Thomas C (1985). ''War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam''. Boulder: Westview Press. Ch. 12. </ref> 50,000-65,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref>Wiesner, Louis A. (1988). ''Victims and Survivors Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam''. New York: Greenwood Press. p.310</ref><ref name="Lewy"/>  The Army of the Republic of Vietnam lost between 171,331 and 220,357 men during the war.<ref>Thayer, Thomas C (1985). ''War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam''. Boulder: Westview Press. p.106.</ref><ref name="Lewy"/> The official US Department of Defense figure was 950,765 communist forces killed in Vietnam from 1965 to 1974. Defense Department officials believed that these body count figures need to be deflated by 30 percent. In addition, Guenter Lewy assumes that one-third of the reported "enemy" killed may have been civilians, concluding that the actual number of deaths of communist military forces was probably closer to 444,000.<ref name="Lewy"/>  Some 200,000–300,000 Cambodians,<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref><ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref><ref name="Banister, Judith 1993">Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.</ref> 20,000–200,000 Laotians,<ref>Warner, Roger, [[Shooting at the Moon (book)|Shooting at the Moon]], (1996), pp366, estimates 30,000 Hmong.</ref><ref>Obermeyer, "Fifty Years of Violent War Deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia", ''British Medical Journal,'' 2008, estimates 60,000 total.</ref><ref>T. Lomperis, ''From People's War to People's Rule,'' (1996), estimates 35,000 total.</ref><ref>Small, Melvin & Joel David Singer, ''Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars 1816–1980'', (1982), estimates 20,000 total.</ref><ref>Taylor, Charles Lewis, ''The World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators,'' estimates 20,000 total.</ref><ref>Stuart-Fox, Martin, ''A History of Laos,'' estimates 200,000 by 1973.</ref> and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict.


There was never a unified command in South Vietnam, as there was in South Korea, for complex reasons. Since there was no multinational mandate, such as the UN issued for the [[Korean War]], there was sensitivity about the U.S. creating the perception of being a colonial power making the RVN a "puppet", which was already a Communist propaganda theme. Had this issue not existed, there were concerns about Communist intelligence agents in the Southern government.
==U.S. replaces France==
===Weak Diem regime===
[[Image:Vietnam relief 2001.jpg|right|thumb|Vietnam as the lightly shaded area.]]
Even if the Communist military threat could be countered by U.S. action, there remained an enormous problem with  the Diem regime itself-- militarily ineffective and politically unpopular. It tried to suppress the non-Communist opposition by large-scale arrests. Its downfall came when it bungled the demands of organized Buddhist monks for a larger voice in political affairs. The multiple interest groups and centers of power in the nation had become alienated from Diem, and gave him no support as he raided the pagodas and arrested demonstrators. Furthermore, he increasingly rejected American demands for political and economic reforms. Washington sadly concluded that Diem had outlived his usefulness, so it stood silent during a military coup on November 1, 1963, that assassinated Diem and installed the first of a long series of unstable governments.<ref> Washington did not approve or order the coup, but it did not try to stop it.</ref>
After the [[Geneva accords]] of 1954 split the former [[French Indochina]] into the [[Republic of Vietnam]] (South) and [[Democratic Republic of Vietnam]] (North), France no longer had colonial authority. After certain procedural matters were resolved in early 1955, the United States took up a major role in training and funding what was now the [[Army of the Republic of Vietnam]] in the South. U.S. intelligence collection personnel had been in the area since the latter part of the [[Second World War]]. In 1954, [[Edward Lansdale]], a [[United States Air Force]] officer seconded to the [[Central Intelligence Agency]], came to [[Saigon]] under the cover of Assistant Air Attache leading the Saigon Military Mission, which was a CIA operation whose immediate activities included sending Vietnamese personnel north, to set up stay-behind intelligence collection and covert action teams for future use.


Kennedy himself was assassinated three weeks later, and [[Lyndon Johnson]] took charge. Diem's death  led to chaos; the strategic hamlet program collapsed, and the Viet Cong recouped their losses and pressed forward across the countryside. ARVN battalions one after another crumbled under intense local attacks. The CIA gave GVN only an "even chance" of surviving.<ref> Quoted in [http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon3/pent1.htm ''Pentagon Papers'' v. 3 ch. 1]</ref>
It has been argued, certainly with some justification, that the U.S. unwisely supported the French before 1954, and still had a pro-French view after 1954. Part of this was due to U.S. diplomatic strategy that saw French cooperation in Europe as essential to NATO and to Western stability, and taking a pro-French position in the former Indochina obtained cooperation from France.   The Vietnamese were not seen as important, in Cold War terms, in the 1940s and 1950s, even though, perhaps ironically, it was Japanese expansion into French Indochina that triggered U.S. [[economic warfare]] against Japan, and eventually the [[Japanese decision for war in 1941]].
====Fear of China, 1960-1964====
Rusk worried that a Communist victory in Vietnam would cause neighboring countries to fall like dominoes to pro-Chinese Communists. The threat was greatest in Indonesia, an island nation with a large population, significant oil wealth, and an active Communist movement. Rusk was concerned about what was called the "falling domino" effect; he thought the fall of neighboring states would be rapid, but others looked for great damage in slow motion, as in a a 1964 CIA estimate: <blockquote>We do not believe that the loss of South Vietnam and Laos would be followed by the rapid, successive communization of other states of Southeast Asia. Instead of a shock wave passing from one to the next, there would be a simultaneous, direct effect on all Far Eastern countries. With the possible exception of Cambodia, it is likely that no nation of the area would quickly succumb to communism as a result of the fall of Laos and South Vietnam. Further, a spread of communism in the area would not be inexorable, and any spread that would happen would take time &mdash; time in which the situation might change in any of a number of ways unfavorable to the Communist cause....The loss of South Vietnam and Laos to the Communists would be profoundly damaging to the US position in the Far East, most especially because the US has committed itself persistently, emphatically, and publicly to preventing Communist takeover of the two countries.<ref name=Kent1964-06-09>{{citation
|  title = Memo 6-9-64 (for the Director of Central Intelligence): Would the Loss of South Vietnam and Laos precipitate a "Domino Effect"
| author = Sherman Kent for the Board of National Estimates
| url = http://cryptome.org/cia-domino/cia-domino.htm}}</ref></blockquote>


In 1965, however, the anti-communist army seized power and totally destroyed the Communist movement in Indonesia with wholesale arrests and executions. This was a surprise to the U.S., which was giving [[CIA activities in Asia-Pacific#Indonesia 1965|covert aid]] to some anti-communist factions, but the Army action followed Communist killing of several generals.
Later, the U.S. would support anticommunist Vietnamese, never neutralists.


===The strategic balance===
While Vietnamese Communists had long had aims to control the whole of Vietnam, the specific decision to conquer the South was made, by the Northern leadership, in May 1959.<ref>An enabling Party resolution was passed in January, but this was the date of starting to build infrastructure; combat use of that infrastructure was still two or more years away. See [[Vietnamese Communist grand strategy]]</ref> The Communist side had clearly defined political objectives, and a grand strategy to achieve them; there was a clear relationship between long-term goals and short-term actions, within their strategic theory of [[North Vietnamese cadre|''dau tranh'']]. Some of their actions may seem to be from Maoist and other models, but they have some unique concepts that are not always obvious.


===Escalation by Viet Cong===
Apart from its internal problems, South Vietnam faced difficult military challenges. On the one hand, there was a threat of a conventional, cross-border strike from the North, reminiscent of the [[Korean War]]. In the 1950s, the U.S. advisors focused on building a "mirror image" of the [[U.S. Army]], designed to meet and defeat a conventional invasion. <ref name=PntV1Ch05Sec0314-346>{{citation
In the early 1960s the Viet Cong escalated its attacks; the Diem regime lost ground every month. In 1961 the Viet Cong had 25,000 regular soldiers and 17,000 underground operatives. The NLF controlled villages containing about a fifth of the rural population of ten million (six million people lived in SVN's cities and towns, where the NLF remained weak.) American observers reported that the Saigon regime lacked legitimacy in the villages. The GVN never generated spontaneous support or a sense of patriotism because it was too much like the French system: too autocratic, too urban, Catholic, aloof, corrupt, arrogant, inefficient, self-indulgent and predatory. The challenge was not to restore legitimacy but get it in the first place.  
| title =The Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition, Volume 2
| contribution = Chapter 6, "The Advisory Build-Up, 1961-1967," Section 1, pp. 408-457
| url = http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon2/pent11.htm}}</ref> Ironically, while the lack of counterguerrilla forces threatened the South for many years, the last two blows were  Korea-style invasions. With U.S. air support, the South were able to largely repel  a [[South Vietnam's ground war, 1972-1975|conventional invasion by North Vietnam]]. The 1975 invasion which defeated the South was not opposed by U.S. forces.


In January 1963, an apparently overwhelming ARVN force, with armored vehicles, artillery and air support, and U.S. advisors including [[John Paul Vann]] went confidently against an inferior force at the [[Battle of Ap Bac]], and were routed. <ref name=Sheehan>{{citation
===Early U.S. noncombat advisory and support roles===
| first = Neil | last = Sheehan
| title = A Bright and Shining Lie
| publisher = Vintage | year = 1989}}</ref>.  This has been considered the triggered for an increasingly skeptical, although small, American press corps in Vietnam.


By October, 1963, Kennedy had sent 16,000 advisors who were working feverishly to shape up the ARVN; 100 had already been killed. The U.S. Air Force began training pilots; the Army sent in helicopter transports. The choppers terrorized the Viet Cong, until they figured out how to ambush them when they landed. After 9,000 combat sorties, 21 airplanes and 13 helicopters had been shot down. Viet Cong influence had been pushed back, but the NLF still controlled a tenth of the rural villages. 
[[Harry S. Truman]], as soon as the [[Second World War]] ended, was under great pressure to return the country to normal civilian conditions, and he demobilised rapidly to release funds for domestic spending. There were no such pressures to demobilize, however, on [[Josef Stalin]] and [[Mao Zedong]]. Truman has been blamed for "losing" Eastern Europe and China, but it is less clear what could have been done to stop it. The decision to cut military commitment came home to roost in the [[Korean War]], when Truman had few forces to dispatch.
===NLF as shadow government===
By contrast, peasants at first found the NLF appeared to be honest, caring and basically like themselves. It had considerable support--it especially appealed to idealistic youth, and in any case was always feared by the villagers who knew the assassination squads would eliminate any dissent. From 1957 through 1972, the Viet Cong Security Service carried out 37,000 assassinations of government officials, religious and civic leaders, teachers, informers, landowners, and moneylenders. The only effective government response was to hunt the guerrillas down, or target their leaders, but that was too dangerous for the dispirited ARVN. Instead Diem's defensive strategy was the "strategic hamlet" program. Millions of villagers were relocated  into new hamlets that the ARVN and local militia forces could defend. The villagers resented the dislocation and the central government's replacement of local leaders.  


==Lyndon Johnson's War, 1963-65==
From 1955, the U.S. took over the role of training and significantly funding the Southern [[Army of the Republic of Viet Nam]] (ARVN). In 1959, the first U.S. advisers to go into combat in the area were in Laos, not Vietnam. With a negotiated settlement to the Laotian civil war in 1962, U.S. attention shifted to South Vietnam. Communications intercepts in 1959, for example, confirmed the start of the Ho Chi Minh trail and other preparation for large-scale fighting. This information may not have been fully shared with the South Vietnamese, due to security concerns over the intelligence methods used to get the information.
Johnson would have to do something unless he wanted to be known as the Democrat who "lost Vietnam." As a believer in the "domino theory," he worried that other countries in Southeast would fall to Communism if the line was not held. The only alternative to containment, he believed, was rollback as advocated by Barry Goldwater. "Why Not Victory?" Goldwater asked; because it means nuclear war, Johnson retorted, as he used the rollback issue to overwhelm Goldwater in the 1964 election. (Whereupon the Air Force revised its manual of air doctrine, to state that "total victory in some situations would be an unreasonable goal."<ref> Quoted in Lieutenant General John W. Pauly, "The Thread of Doctrine," [http://www.airpower.au.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1976/may-jun/pauly.html  ''Air University Review, May-June 1976'' online] </ref>
===Domestic politics===
Equally important to Johnson than what happened in Asia was what was happening at home, especially in the minds of the voters.<ref name=McMaster /> Vietnam was a "political war" only in the sense of U.S. domestic politics, not a political settlement for the Vietnamese.  


The President always put domestic politics first, especially his far-reaching reform progran called the [[Great Society]]. Having been a Democratic Senate leader in the early 1950s who had to defend against Republican charges that the Democrats had "lost" China and failed in Korea, Johnson was determined that a similar political disaster had to be avoided at all costs.
==Interactions of South Vietnamese & U.S. politics==
<blockquote>"I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went," he vowed.<ref> Phillip B. Davidson, ''Vietnam at War: The History: 1946-1975'' (1991) [http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0195067924/ref=sib_books_pg?ie=UTF8&keywords=%26%2334%3Bsaw%20Southeast%20Asia%20go%20the%20way%20China%20went&p=S08V&checkSum=K3IhTdGczWfDBu1lYKVqKE80z7KFvL4%252BQ%252FQ7E5X2CWg%253D  quoted p. 304] </ref></blockquote>


He tried several different strategies, but running through them all was a policy of controlling popular perceptions. In plain words, deception. <ref name=McMaster />
After the French colonial authority ended, Vietnam was ruled by a nominally civilian government, led by first [[Bao Dai]] and then, from 1954, by [[Ngo Dinh Diem]]; neither were elected. Communist statements frequently spoke of it as a U.S. "puppet" government, although the Northern government had not been elected and had little more claim to democratic legitimacy. Both governments were clients of the different major sides in the [[Cold War]].


The American people were never to become alarmed at the magnitude of the problem; White House policy was to keep reassuring the nation that everything was going fine in Vietnam, and that LBJ could be trusted to handle the situation in his own way. This was the only war in American history in which Washington did not try to rouse patriotic fervor behind the cause; indeed, Johnson tried to subdue any spontaneous outpourings of patriotism. The reason was that a surge of patriotism would lead to demands for victory and rollback--Goldwaterism--and risk nuclear destruction from Russian missiles. Even if the nation escaped nuclear war, a frenzy of pro-war patriotism would doom funding for Johnson's domestic programs, his "[[The Great Society]]". The Johnson solution was to keep the war quiet.
Diem was strongly anti-communist, but authoritarian, and there were increasing protests against his rule. He was a Catholic in a Buddhist-majority country, but gave preference to Catholics. While personally ascetic, he tolerated a serious level of corruption in the government.
 
On the other hand, allowing the Communists to take over a U.S. client was unacceptable to Johnson; as shown in the McNaughton Memo, the key position was avoiding a decisive blow to Johnson's deep commitment to containment. <ref name=McNaughton /> "The central lesson of our time," Johnson told a John Hopkins audience in April 1965, "is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next." He continued, We must say in southeast Asia--as we did in Europe--in the words of the Bible: 'Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.'" Privately he felt that if he lost Vietnam to the communists, everything he wanted to work for at home--civil rights, the War on Poverty, and his Great Society--would also be lost.  
<blockquote>"I'd be  giving a big fat reward to aggression," he explained years later, and "there would follow in this country an endless national debate--a mean and destructive debate--that would shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy."<ref> Quoted in Doris Kearns, ''Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream'' (1976), p. 252.</ref> </blockquote>
====Johnson's plan to settle war====
Johnson did have a plan for settling the conflict, one that conformed to containment policy, and to New Deal liberalism. Johnson believed that all disputes arose out of mutual misunderstandings, and could be resolved through negotiation. His strategy was to offer Hanoi billions of dollars in foreign aid if they would play along, or else bomb them into negotiations, from which a permanent peace would result that allowed South Vietnam to continue as an independent nation.  


Johnson did not reject the possibility that the Communists could become part of some sort of coalition government. He apparently was unaware that Vietnamese history was against him, as when the [[VNQDD]] was purged from the "broad front" Viet Minh by the Communists.
===Effect on military efficiency===


The military, which saw its mission in terms of winning wars, not facilitators for negotiations, never agreed with Johnson, or, perhaps more to the point, with McNamara. In the 1950s, when [[Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff]] Arthur Radford recommended major U.S. intervention at [[Dien Bien Phu]], possibly including [[nuclear weapon]]s, Eisenhower was quite confident in refusing Radford. The other members of the JCS had not supported Radford.
Not only under Diem, appointing officers to the command of military units, and also to posts in the separate hierarchy of district and province chiefs, often were made as political loyalty as the first criterion, possibly bribes or favors at the next, and military proficiency sometimes as a last consideration. Officers were shifted from post to post, in the interest of breaking up potential coup plots.  


By the time Johnson took office, there was already a significant U.S. involvement in Vietnam,. although large-scale combat forces had not been committed. McNamara, who had been appointed by Kennedy, continued to push an economic and signaling grand strategy to Johnson. Johnson and McNamara, although it would be hard to find two men of more different personality, formed a quick bond. McNamara appeared more impressed by economics and Schelling's  compellance theory <ref name=Carlson2005>{{citation
In practice, the most powerful military positions were the commanders of the four Corps tactical zones (CTZ), also known as military regions. Even though a CTZ was geographic, and province and district chiefs were usually military officers, the province/district reporting went through the Ministry of the Interior rather than the military Joint General Staff.  
| title = The Failure of Coercive Diplomacy: Strategy Assessment for the 21st Century
| first = Justin | last = Carlson
| journal = Hemispheres: Tufts Journal of International Affairs
| url = http://ase.tufts.edu/hemispheres/2005/Carlson.doc}}</ref> than by Johnson's liberalism or Senate-style deal-making, but they agreed in broad policy.
 
Johnson responded by picking new generals who would play along, and by closely monitored them to make sure that he would never encounter another MacArthur-type insubordinate commander. Ironically, after Johnson said he would not run for re-election in 1968, [[Creighton Abrams]], who took over MACV from [[William Westmoreland]], was far more oriented toward a holistic approach to nationbuilding than Westmoreland's attritional strategy.
 
====Congress====
With the Pentagon under control, Johnson kept Congress out of the policy making process, and Congress did not assert its authority over the making of war. He ignored antiwar "doves" like Senator [[William Fulbright]], the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. More of a political threat were "hawks" like GOP Senator [[Barry Goldwater]], articulate spokesman for the nascent conservative movement, and Democratic Senator [[John Stennis]], the chair of the powerful Armed Services Committee.<ref> Joseph A. Fry, ''Debating Vietnam: Fulbright, Stennis, and Their Senate Hearings.'' (2006); Michael S. Downs, "Advise and Consent: John Stennis and the Vietnam War, 1954-1973." ''Journal of Mississippi History'' 1993 55(2): 87-114. Issn: 0022-2771  </ref> Johnson feared that if Congress had a voice it would push for a more aggressive, expensive war that would sabotage his high- spending low-tax "Great Society" domestic program. War taxes would be politically disastrous in the next election. Even worse, Congress might reject his forced-negotiations strategy and insist upon a roll-back strategy aiming at the defeat and conquest of North Vietnam. The surest lesson Johnson and the liberals had learned in Korea was that MacArthur's roll-back strategy had led to Chinese intervention and humiliation. Under no circumstances would they accept a roll-back policy.<ref> The Army's "Campaign Plan--North Vietnam" of 1955 envisioned eight American and five ARVN divisions using tactical (battlefield) nuclear weapons to invade and conquer North Vietnam in one year; it assumed China would not intervene. It is not publicly known whether there were later invasion plans. Spector (2005) 270-1; ''Pentagon Papers''  4:299</ref> 
 
Containment had to work. Johnson therefore refused to pull out. The South Vietnamese clearly were unable to save themselves with just American advice; Johnson made the fateful decision to rescue them with US combat troops. He planned to first rescue GVN (Government of South Vietnam) from imminent collapse by guerrilla attacks, then negotiate a settlement with Hanoi that would allow it to survive. He vetoed two other options: US command and control of the ARVN (unwise because GVN would never learn to defend itself) and invasion of North Vietnam to strike the threat at its source. In mid-1964, LBJ assembled a new team. Looking for a yes-man, he passed over 43 more senior generals to promote [[Harold Johnson]] (1912-83) to Chief of Staff of the Army. Maxwell Taylor left the chairmanship of the JCS to became ambassador, with authority over all diplomatic, CIA and military operations in Vietnam. General [[Earle Wheeler]] (1908-75) replaced Taylor at JCS; his mission was to keep the senior commanders loyal to the White House.<ref>Charles F. Brower, "Strategic Reassessment in Vietnam: the Westmoreland "Alternate Strategy" of 1967-1968." ''Naval War College Review'' 1991 44(2): 20-51. Issn: 0028-1484 </ref>
 
General [[William Westmoreland]] (1914-2005) became head of MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam), with authority over US Army and Marine ground operations, and some naval and tactical air operations. He was one of the few senior officers since 1940 not to have attended the military's internal school system, especially the command and general staff college and the various war colleges. However he had studied at Harvard Business School, and his freedom from standard doctrine and his interest in quantification attracted him to McNamara.<ref>Samuel Zaffiri, ''Westmoreland: A Biography of General William C. Westmoreland'' (1994)  </ref>
 
Admiral Ulysses Sharp (1906-2001) at Pearl Harbor, became head of all US forces in the Pacific. He had charge of the naval blockade that kept Hanoi from running supplies by sea, and most importantly, of strategic bombing operations over North Vietnam (which were launched from Sharp's four aircraft carriers or from Air Force B-52 bases in Thailand and Guam). Nominally Westmoreland reported to Taylor, Sharp, [[Harold Johnson]] and Wheeler; in practice he dealt directly with McNamara or LBJ. Westmoreland could always be counted upon for a public statement exuding optimism; he reassured LBJ that the war would be won in time for the 1968 elections. The intricate division of responsibility was set up so that there would be no powerful theater commander like MacArthur; it also guaranteed a steady flow of disputes that could only be resolved by McNamara or the president. The military thus never had control of the war it was called upon to fight, or of the tactics to use.
 
===Gulf of Tonkin incident: 1964===
In early August 1964 Johnson seized on an ambiguous incident in which North Vietnamese PT boats reportedly fired on a US destroyer; this became known as the [[Gulf of Tonkin incident]]. The public message was that the destroyer was on general patrol.
 
Less well known, however, were that simultaneous covert attacks on the North Vietnamese coast, coordinated by MACV-SOG operating under [[Gulf of Tonkin incident#covert operations| Operations Plan (OPPLAN) 34A]], and the North Vietnamese were on high alert. The destroyer was actually collecting [[signals intelligence]] under a program called the [[Gulf of Tonkin incident#DESOTO patrols and naval response|DESOTO patrol]],<REF name=NSAtonkin>{{cite web
  | last = National Security Agency
  | authorlink = National Security Agency
  | title = Gulf of Tonkin
  | work = declassified materials, 2005 and 2006
  | date = 11/30/2005 and 05/30/2006
  | url = http://www.espionageinfo.com/An-Ba/Army-Security-Agency.html
  | accessdate =  2007-10-02}}</ref> and tecently declassified [[National Security Agency]] [[signals intelligence]] reports  indicate that the U.S. commanders knew that the North Vietnamese were uncertain if the destroyers were part of the same attacks as 34A. There has never been clear-cut [[geophysical MASINT#acoustic MASINT|sonar]] or SIGINT information that the North Vietnamese initiated an attack on the destroyer patrol, although one of the destroyers may have fired warning shots.  


Although there was no immediate and continuing threat to U.S. forces, Johnson ordered retaliatory airstrikes on the North. His television address to the U.S. public, explaining he had ordered it under his authority as commander-in-chief, was delivered while the strikes were still inbound and the North Vietnamese air defenses not yet alerted. According to McMaster, Johnson insisted on an early announcement so that he would be sure to make the late evening news, as well as the deadline for morning newspapers. <ref name=McMaster />
Especially powerful units might, in the interest of interfering with coups, be shifted from one chain of command for another. At the [[Battle of Ap Bac]], for example, the potent [[armored personnel carrier]]s (APC) had been shifted from the operational control of the military commander to that of the province chief. Before the unit commander would commit his resources to battle, at the urging of a U.S. adviser to the [[division (military)|division]] commander, the commanding officer of the APC company had to obtain province chief as well as military approval, significantly increasing the time before this unit could intervene in battle.


However, the North Vietnamese had indeed sunk an American ship in May, and had begun to kill American advisors; they were clearly testing Washington. He immediately rammed the "[[Gulf of Tonkin incident#Gulf of Tonkin resolution|Gulf of Tonkin Resolution]]" through Congress, saying it would deter Hanoi. The Resolution was itself vague, endorsing the Commander-in-Chief's right to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack...and to prevent further aggression." Not only did the Resolution give Johnson a boost during his heated 1964 reelection campaign, it also provided just enough legality for him to avoid going back to 
===Conflicting goals===
Congress. In the election Johnson battled Republican Senator [[Barry Goldwater]], warning vehemently that Goldwater's "Why Not Victory" rollback strategy would produce a nuclear war with the Soviets. Surprisingly little discussion of Vietnam took place. Virtually all the information and advice that reached Johnson and McNamara in 1963-65 was deeply pessimistic: the consensus was that the South Vietnam government was too corrupt, and its army was too inefficient, to withstand the Communists. The only chance for containment--a slim one--was to have American soldiers take command of the war and defeat the Viet Cong forces on the ground, while hurting North Vietnam just enough to convince them to negotiate.
Vietnamese and U.S. goals were also not always in complete agreement. Until 1969, the U.S.A. was generally anything opposed to any policy, nationalist or not, which might lead to the South Vietnamese becoming neutralist rather than anticommunist. There is evidence that the U.S. supported attempts to replace governments that were considering forming a neutralist coalition that might include the [[National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam]], a communist-dominated opposition. The Cold War [[containment policy]] was in force through the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Administrations, while the Nixon administration supported a more multipolar model of [[detente]].


===Escalation 1965=== 
While there were still power struggles and internal corruption, there was much more stability between 1967 and 1975. Still, the South Vietnamese government did not enjoy either widespread popular support, or even an enforced social model of a Communist state. It is much easier to disrupt a state without common popular or decision maker goals.
Immediately after his triumphant landslide, Johnson made his move. The NLF was on the verge of announcing a provisional government in the northernmost six provinces; three elite regiments from the North Vietnamese Main Force moved into South Vietnam. Hanoi thought it could win quickly and that America was a paper tiger. It was a tragic miscalculation that would bring endless misery to the Vietnamese. Johnson sent in the first American combat troops in March, 1965, to protect the air bases. Rejecting the Air Force's strategy of strategic bombing against 94 critical targets<ref>The  document listing these targets, 7 Sep 1964 JCS Talking Paper for CJCS, "Next Courses of Action for RVN" [ indeed starts with 1 and ends with 94, but it only contains 93 distinct targets</ref> in the North, Johnson and McNamara instead launched an alternative air power strategy called "Rolling Thunder." It entailed retaliatory bombing anytime Communists struck at American forces, together with a gradual buildup of  22 bombing attacks against small military targets in the North. There was to be no bombing of cities or villages, and no attacks on the ships bringing Russian and Chinese arms to the port of Haiphong. To reverse the downhill slide in the villages, Westmoreland called for 24 more maneuver [[battalion]]s (of approximately 800-1000 men each) added to the 20 he had, plus more artillery, aviation (helicopters), and support units; McNamara rounded the total to 175,000 troops, with 27 more maneuver battalions to come in 1966. Westmoreland's "ultimate aim" was:
<blockquote>"To pacify the Republic of [South] Vietnam by destroying the VC—his forces, organization, terrorists, agents, and propagandists—while at the same time reestablishing the government apparatus, strengthening GVN military forces, rebuilding the administrative machinery, and re-instituting the services of the Government. During this process security must be provided to all of the people on a progressive basis."<ref> John M. Carland, "Winning the Vietnam War: Westmoreland's Approach in Two Documents." ''Journal of Military History" 2004 68(2): 553-574. Issn: 0899-3718 in [[Project Muse]], with full text of "DIRECTIVE NUMBER 525-4  (MACJ3) 17 September 1965: TACTICS AND TECHNIQUES FOR EMPLOYMENT OF US FORCES IN THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM."  </ref> </blockquote> 


Westmoreland complained that, "we are not engaging the VC with sufficient frequency or effectiveness to win the war in Vietnam."  He said that American troops had shown themselves to be superb soldiers, adept at carrying out attacks against base areas and mounting sustained operations in populated areas. Yet, the operational initiative— decisions to engage and disengage—continued to be with the enemy. He told American commanders to use better  intelligence to find better ways to take the fight to the enemy. Only by doing so could U.S. forces make the best use of America's twin advantages of firepower and mobility. Westmoreland's strategy was to hunt down and attack enemy infantry formations.  
===Instability===
The association of the U.S. with the RVN government, however, was sufficiently strong that instability there both reflected adversely on the U.S. role, and seen as interfering with the fight against Communism. While Diem ruled between 1954 and 1963; there followed a period of frequent changes of government, some lasting only weeks, between 1964 and 1967, until moderate stability came in 1967.


Simple search and destroy approach that consisted of attacking and blocking forces would not work in Vietnam's jungles because the VC had the uncanny the ability to "slip out from between the hammer and the anvil" in these operations. Thus, the Americans needed to cover all likely escape routes. Westmoreland rejected the Marine Corps alternative program of building up a close rapport with the peasant and defending their villages.  
Protests generally called the [[Buddhist crisis of 1963]], which also involved other Vietnamese sects, such as the [[Cao Dai]] and [[Hoa Hao]], were a major disruption by June. These protests were seen by the U.S. as strengthening the Communist insurgency, and, after rejecting earlier initiatives for a military coup, agreed that Diem had to go.  


McNamara realized that Westmoreland's search and destroy plan would be costly, with perhaps 500 Americans killed every month. Washington having explicitly rejected rollback and victory had a goal of containment that would allow South Vietnam to continue to exist as a non-Communist state.
In November 1963, Diem was overthrown and killed in a military coup. The United States was aware of the coup preparations and, through CIA officer [[Lucien Conein]], had given limited financial support to the generals involved. There is no evidence that the U.S. expected Diem, and his brother and closest political adviser, [[Ngo Dinh Nhu]] to be killed; U.S. Ambassador [[Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.]] had offered him physical protection.


====Antiwar movement====
The leaders of the November coup were replaced by a nominal civilian government really under military control, which was overthrown by yet another military coup (involving some of the same generals) in January 1964.  
While Washington tried to keep the war quiet, radical college students in the US launched a noisy antiwar protest movement with teach-ins and rallies. Their efforts were counterproductive, because they forced millions of Americans who might have had doubts about the war to support the Administration for patriotic reasons.


The antiwar credo focused on the illegality and immorality of  American action, and praised the heroic peasants fighting western imperialism. Much was made of napalm and forced resettlement, to create a sense of American guilt rather than reflect empathy with the Vietnamese. After the war, protesters maintained the guilt theme, but forgot about the Vietnamese. Senator Fulbright, the most prominent dove, lacked empathy with the Vietnamese. As a believer in white supremacy, he believed white Americans should not die to save an inferior colored race.<ref>  Randall Bennett Woods, ''Fulbright: A Biography'' (2006), p, 115 </ref> The most prominent military "dove" was retired Marine Corps Commandant David Shoup. He argued in 1967 that Americans should ignore the issue of freedom in Asia because, "I don't think the whole of Southeast Asia, as related to the present and future safety and freedom of the people of this country, is worth the life and limb of a single American." The Vietnamese, he added, "have no idea of our meaning of freedom." <ref> Howard Jablon, "General David M. Shoup, U.S.M.C.: Warrior and War Protester." ''Journal of Military History'' 1996 60(3): 513-538 at pp. 532. 537 [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0899-3718%28199607%2960%3A3%3C513%3AGDMSUW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S in JSTOR]</ref> Until Tet in early 1968, the clear majority of Americans (including students) took a "hawkish" stance on the war.
Between 1964 and 1967 there was a constant struggle for power in South Vietnam, and not just from within the military. Several Buddhist and other factions often derived from religious sects, which became involved in the jockeying for political power, such as the [[Cao Dai]] and [[Hoa Hao]]. Even the [[Vietnamese Buddhism|Vietnamese Buddhists]] were not monolithic, and had their own internal struggles. At varying times, sects, organized crime syndicates such as the [[Binh Xuyen]], and individual provincial leaders had paramilitary groups that affected the political process; while the [[Montagnard]] ethnic groups wanted autonomy for their region. [[William Colby]] (then chief of the [[Central Intelligence Agency]]'s , Far Eastern Division in the operational directorate) observed that civilian politicians "divided and sub-divided into a tangle of contesting ambitions and claims and claims to power and participation in the government." <ref>William Colby, ''Lost Victory'', 1989, p. 173, quoted in McMaster, p. 165</ref> Some of these factions sought political power or wealth, while others sought to avoid domination by other groups (Catholic vs Buddhist in the Diem Coup).  


By the end of 1965 there were 184,000 Americans inside Vietnam, plus 22,400 Allies (from Korea, Australia and New Zealand). Having quietly become so deeply involved, meant the US could no longer easily back out; the war had become a quagmire. On the other hand it had to be kept low key lest it interfere with Johnson's domestic goals, and the geostrategic goals became increasingly vague.
After a period of overt military government, there was a gradual transition to at least the appearance of democratic government, but South Vietnam neither developed a true popular government, nor rooted out the corruption that caused a lack of support.


===Rolling Thunder: The Failure of Strategic Bombing===   
==Covert operations==
Well before the Gulf of Tonkin and overt operations, there were a number of covert operations, some ostensibly with U.S. advisers to South Vietnamese crews, and some, especially in Laos, of which no public announcement was made. Certain of these operations became public in postwar historical analyses, official announcements at the time, or press reporting that eventually was confirmed.
===US activity before independence===
Still, there was U.S. activity in [[Southeast Asia]], which grew out of covert operations directed more at China. In August 1950, the CIA bought the assets of [[Civil Air Transport]] (CAT), an airline founded after the [[Second World War]] by Gen. Claire L. Chennault and Whiting Willauer. While CAT continued commercial operations, it acted as a CIA "proprietary", or covert support organization under commercial cover. CAT aircraft, for example, dropped personnel and supplies over mainland China during the [[Korean War]].<ref name=Leary>{{citation
|  title = CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955-1974, Supporting the "Secret War"
| author = William M. Leary
| journal = Studies in Intelligence
| url = https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art7.html
| date = Winter 1999-2000
| publisher = [[Central Intelligence Agency]]}}</ref> CAT later became part of [[Air America]].


Johnson had to prove that containment was a viable project, and that American power could deter an invasion and protect a friend without the necessity of widening the war and invading the enemy. The operation had to be an object lesson to Moscow and Peking to not try anything like this anywhere else in the world ever again. The Joint Chiefs who wanted to win quickly and get out were echoing a roll-back strategy that Johnson was committed to refute. Roll-back meant Douglas MacArthur, Barry Goldwater, John Stennis, and defeat for LBJ and his Great Society--and it could well mean nuclear missiles raining down on American cities. At all costs Johnson felt compelled to make his policy work.
When [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]] succeeded Truman as President in 1952, after a campaign that had attacked Truman's "weaknesses" against communism and in Korea, he formulated a strong policy of containing Communism. There was much sensitivity over "softness" exemplified by the excesses of Senator [[Joe McCarthy]]. While the Eisenhower Administration avoided becoming too enmeshed in the French problem of the [[Indochinese revolution]], airlift was provided by CAT pilots. [[United States Air Force]] [[C-119 Flying Boxcar]] transports, repainted with French insignia. CAT trained the crews at Clark Air Force base in the Philippines, and then flew the aircraft to [[Gia Lam Airport]] in [[Hanoi]]. They made airdrops to French forces in Laos between May and July. Eventually, CAT flew logistics missions to [[Dien Bien Phu]], in March to May 1954; one aircraft was shot down and others damaged.


Johnson and McNamara adopted a three-tier strategy to save SVN. First they sent in Army and Marine infantry to protect US bases and repel enemy ground attacks. Second, they used air power to blast away at the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. Third they began Rolling Thunder over North Vietnam. The latter had a triple purpose: to boost Saigon's morale, weaken Hanoi's war- making capabilities, and force them to the bargaining table. Bombing seemed a cheap solution: the Air Force and Navy had plenty of air power to spare, and the raids would cause few American casualties. The targets were primarily transportation lines, bridges, railway yards, storage dumps, and oil tanks; civilian areas were to be avoided. The raids were closely controlled by the White House, which saw them as "signals" in a negotiating process with Hanoi. Raids were calibrated so that each month they became more punitive. The theory was that sooner or later Hanoi's pain threshold would be crossed and they would agree to negotiate a plan that would allow SVN to survive.  
===Laos===
After France left the region, the Royal Lao Government (RLG) quietly asked the United States to replace the former French funding of the Lao military, and to add military technical aid from the increasingly active Communist insurgency, the Pathet Lao. This assistance started in January 1955, directed by a new part of the Embassy, with the nondescript name Program Evaluation Office (PEO). At first, the PEO simply dispensed funds, but took on a much larger role in 1959.  


In line with a "signaling" model proposed by Harvard strategist Thomas Schelling, LBJ refused to allow the most valuable installations, those around Hanoi and Haiphong, to be attacked. The idea was that damage future was more harrowing than damage present. In practice, the slow escalation gave Hanoi time to camouflage and decentralize its installations, and thus minimize the damage.
When the first direct military assistance began in July 1959, the PEO was operated by the U.S. [[Central Intelligence Agency]] using military personnel acting as civilians. <ref name=Haas>{{cite web
 
  | url = http://aupress.au.af.mil/Books/Haas/Haas.pdf
Historians (on all sides) are quite unanimous that Rolling Thunder was a total failure.<ref> Col. Dennis Drew, ''Rolling Thunder 1965: Anatomy of a Failure'' (1986);  Merle L., Pribbenow, II, "Rolling Thunder and Linebacker Campaigns: the North Vietnamese View." ''Journal of American-East Asian Relations'' 2001 10(3-4): 197-210. Issn: 1058-3947  </ref>  North Vietnam was a very poor agricultural country with few likely targets in the first place. Unlike Germany and Japan in World War Two, it did not manufacture its own munitions, but imported them from China and Russia. LBJ vetoed plans to mine Haiphong harbor and cut the railroad lines at the Chinese border. Johnson, who had been a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1950, vividly remembered the Chinese intervention in Korea that year, and refused to permit any military action that might somehow trigger another intervention. In striking contrast to the attacks on Berlin, Tokyo and a hundred other World War Two targets, the vast majority of bombs landed on empty jungle.  
  | title = Apollo’s Warriors: US Air Force Special Operations during the Cold War
 
  | author = Haas, Michael E.
Vietnamese jungle caused much military difficulty. In the 1964 election, [[Barry Goldwater]] never recovered from speculation about possibility of using low-yield nuclear weapons to defoliate infiltration routes in Vietnam, he never actually advocated the use of nuclear weapons against the North Vietnamese. Nevertheless, the Democrats easily painted Goldwater as a warmonger who would drop atomic bombs on Hanoi.<ref name=ThisDay>{{citation
  | publisher = Air University Press
  | date = September 22, 1964
| year = 1997
  | title = Goldwater attacks Johnson's Vietnam policy
}}, p. 165</ref>  CIA sent a unit from [[United States Army Special Forces]], who arrived on the CIA proprietary airline [[Air America]], wearing civilian clothes and having no obvious US connection. These soldiers led [[Meo]] and [[Hmong people#The "Secret War"|Hmong]] tribesmen against Communist forces. The covert program was called [[Operation Hotfoot]]. At the US Embassy, BG John Heintges was designated the head of the PEO. <ref name=>{{cite web
  | author = The History Channel
  | url = http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/p4013coll2&CISOPTR=979&filename=980.pdf
  | url = http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Article&id=1373
| title=Seminole Negro Indians, Macabebes, and Civilian Irregulars: Models for the Future Employment of Indigenous Forces
}}</ref>   
| organization=US Army Command and General Staff College
 
| author = Holman, Victor
Under [[Operation RANCH HAND]], the U.S. military sprayed large areas with a defoliant called [[Agent Orange]]. While Agent Orange itself was considered nontoxic to humans, and was primarily composed of conventional herbicides 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, many batches had an exceptionally toxic byproduct of the manufacturing process, which caused caused significant contamination, and long-term health consequences, including defects, on both Vietnamese and Americans. This was also used by Canadian Forces in Canada, who documented the later-understood health effects. <ref name=CForange>{{citation
| year = 1995
| author = Defence Canada
| title = The Use of Herbicides at CFB Gagetown from 1952 to Present Day
  | url = http://www.dnd.ca/site/reports/defoliant/index_e.asp
}}</ref>
}}</ref>


As in the schoolboy joke about making your head feel good by stopping the hammer blows, Johnson from time to time experimented with bombing pauses that would make Hanoi eager to come to terms. They never did. It cost the US a billion dollars a year to destroy $100 million in PAVN supplies--but Washington had the tens of billions and Hanoi did not have the tens of millions. It did have friends, however, and Moscow and Peking doubled their shipments of munitions. Moscow sent in sophisticated air defense systems; 922 planes went down. Rolling Thunder dropped 640,000 tons of bombs, but pilots protested angrily that political restrictions radically reduced their effectiveness. As one Navy flier growled in his diary:
In April 1961, [[Chief of Staff of the Air Force]] [[Curtis LeMay]]’s began to approve certain covert operations, such as JUNGLE JIM. He denied them to the press. They were, however, a response to President Kennedy's challenge for the military to develop a force capable of fighting the “Communist
<blockquote>We fly a limited aircraft, drop limited ordnance, on rare  targets in a severely limited amount of time. Worst of  all we do this in a limited and highly unpopular war....What I've got is personal pride pushing against a tangled web of frustration.<ref> Quoted in . Clodfelter 134</ref></blockquote> 
revolutionary warfare”, regarded as proxy wars for the U.S. and Soviet Union. One of the first to
respond to the call for combat control volunteers<ref>Haas, pp. 212-214, 221-224</ref>


Rolling Thunder did reduce the southward flow of arms somewhat, and definitely forced Hanoi to divert more and more of its resources to logistics, air defense and rebuilding. More than half of the North's electric power, oil storage, bridges and railroad yards had to be rebuilt. Supplies were hidden in small caches or buried underground, which further attenuated Hanoi's logistics capability. The raids made it quite impossible for PAVN to send large units or tanks into the south. The suffering of its people held a lower priority for the Politburo than its quest for victory, so it simply ignored the "signals" that Rolling Thunder was supposed to be sending. An unexpected denouement for McNamara and other civilians who had placed blind trust in the invincibility of air power was a growing sense of frustration and defeatism. McNamara himself concluded the bombing was a failure, and that therefore the whole war was doomed. The President, however, more empathy with the South Vietnamese than his advisors (perhaps because he was highly sensitive to the plight of nonwhites.) He pushed on.
===CIA, MACV-SOG and OPPLAN34A===
John F. Kennedy approved, on May 11, 1961, a [[Central Intelligence Agency]] plan for covert operations against North Vietnam. These included ground, air, and naval operations. Eventually, the operations were transferred to officially military control, in a unit, [[MACV-SOG]], principally reporting to MACV but with an approval chain that often ran to the White House.  


===Westmoreland's Attrition Strategy=== 
CIA naval operations, under Tucker Gougelmann, in 1961,<ref name=Shultz>{{citation|
Westmoreland in 1965 got 175,000 of the best soldiers in the world. MACV was delighted that the skills and esprit of the American troops were outstanding. The most ambitious young officers and the most experienced NCOs volunteered at once. Despite some shortages, the US Army had never been in nearly as good shape at the start of a war. The basic infantry unit was the rifle platoon of 41 men commanded by a lieutenant. It was subdivided into three rifle squads (commanded by sergeants), and a weapons squad carrying two excellent M60 light machine guns. The company, commanded by captain, had three rifle platoons and a [[mortar]] platoon that provided on-the-spot light artillery. The infantry maneuver battalion, about 1,000 men strong and commanded by a lieutenant colonel, had five companies. At peak Westmoreland had 100 infantry battalions, the main maneuver and fighting unit of the war. Routinely it received 500 hours a month of helicopter support from corps' command. Above the battalion were brigades and divisions; in this war they handled paperwork, letting the battalions do the fighting. Overall, 20% of the soldiers were in "teeth" (combat) roles; the rest were "tail," assigned to advisory missions, logistics, maintenance, construction, medicine and administration. 
title = the Secret War against Hanoi: the untold story of spies, saboteurs, and covert warriors in North Vietnam
| first = Richard H., Jr. | last = Shultz
| publisher = Harper Collins Perennial | year = 2000}}, p. 18</ref> starting with motorized junks. The first [[fast attack craft|motor torpedo boats]] were transferred to CIA in October 1962. At the end of 1962, raids began.  


Westmoreland's first challenge was figuring out a strategy to defeat the Viet Cong.
They received their improved Norwegian Nasty-class boats in 1963.<ref>Shultz, p. 176</ref> These more sophisticated craft were crewed by Norwegian and German mercenaries as well as South Vietnamese; U.S. Navy SEALs conducted the training in Danang.  
*Phase I: stabilize the situation (by the end of 1965)
*Phase II: (scheduled for 1966-67) would push the enemy back in key areas
MACV-SOG was formed in January 1964, and took over the "modest" CIA maritime operation, based in [[Danang]], now given the cover name Naval Advisory Detachment, actually branch OP37 of MACV-SOG. The attacks, under the command of MACV-SOG, were actually carried out by the Coastal Security Service of the RVN [[Strategic Technical Directorate]].
*Phase III: total victory (1968).  
====Marine plan====
The Marines, with responsibility for "I Corps," the northern third of the country, had a plan for Phase I. It reflected their historic experience in pacification programs in Haiti and Nicaragua early in the century. <ref name=USMC-SW>{{citation
| title = Small Wars Manual (Reprint of 1940 Edition)
| author = United States Marine Corps
| url = http://www.smallwars.quantico.usmc.mil/sw_manual.asp}}</ref>


Noting that 80% of the population lived in 10% of the land, they proposed to separate the Viet Cong from the populace. It was a major challenge, since the NLF controlled the great majority of villages in I Corps. Working outward from Da Nang and two other enclaves, 25,000 Marines of the III Marine Amphibious Force<ref>The normal Marine term is "[[Marine Expeditionary Force]]", but "Expeditionary" had unfortunate colonialist connotations in Vietnam. Current USMC terminology is MEF.</ref> systematically eliminated Viet Cong soldiers and guerrilla forces, and sought to weed out NLF cadres from the villages.  
So, at least a year before the Gulf of Tonkin, there had been some raids against North Vietnam. Independent of MACV-SOG, the U.S. Navy began to conduct [[signals intelligence]] patrols for the [[National Security Agency]], close to North Vietnam but in international waters. These were called the DESOTO patrols, and used overt U.S. Navy [[destroyer]]s, with a van packed with electronics and technicians mounted on their decks.


The main device was the [[Foreign internal defense|Combined Action Platoon]], with a 15-man rifle squad and 34 local militia. Rather than having separate "advisory" units, the bulk of the CAP members served alongside the local militia, building personal relationships. It would "capture and hold" hamlets and villages. The Marines put heavy stress on honesty in local government, land reform (giving more to the peasants) and MEDCAP patrols that offered immediate medical assistance to villagers. In some respects, the CAP volunteers had assignments similar to the much more highly trained [[United States Army Special Forces]], but they would make use of whatever skills they had. One young Marine, for example, was a graduate of a high school in an agricultural area in the U.S., came from a family hog farm that went back several generations, and won competitions for teenagers who raised prized hogs. While he was no military expert, he was recognized as helping enormously with the critical pork production in villages.  
On the night of July 30, 1964, four MACV-SOG boats shelled North Vietnamese shore installations, after a series of earlier maritime operations. The North Vietnamese went on high naval alert.


Marines in CAP had the highest proportion of volunteering for successive Vietnam tours of any branch of the Marine Corps. Many villages considered the CAP personnel part of their extended family.
On July 31, 1964, there was a DESOTO patrol.<ref name=McMaster>{{citation
| author = [[H. R. McMaster]]
| title = Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam  
| publisher = Harpercollins | year = 1997}}, pp. 120-134</ref> The timing after the MACV-SOG operation may have been coincidental, although there have been suggestions that the increased North Vietnamese activity was a rich environment for SIGINT collection. There is no strong indication that the DESOTO patrols were trying to provoke North Vietnamese response; they carefully stayed in international waters and were fully identifiable as U.S. ships.


The official slogan about "winning hearts and minds" gave way to the more informal "Get the people by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow." Ambassador Taylor welcomed the Marine strategy as the best solution for a basically political problem; it would also minimize American casualties.<ref>David M. Berman, "Civic Action," in Spencer Tucker, ed. ''Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War'' [http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0195135253/ref=sib_dp_bod_ex?ie=UTF8&p=S00M#reader-link p. 73-74] </ref>  
==U.S. buildup and overt combat involvement==
This section focuses on the period when U.S. forces became involved in large-scale, direct combat. Wherever possible, the national-level decisions that went into a change of military action will be presented, but, in a number of situations, an action may have been the result of a perceived need to "do something" rather than having a direct effect on the enemy.  Such decision-making style is not unique to this period. [[George Kennan]], considered a consummate diplomat and diplomatic theorist, observed that American leaders, starting with the 1899-1900 [[Open Door Policy|"Open Door" policy]] to China, have a <blockquote>neurotic self-consciousness and introversion, the tendency to make statements and take actions with regard not to their effect on the international scene but rather to their effect on those echelons of American opinion, congressional opinion first and foremost, to which the respect statesmen are anxious to appeal. The question became not: How effective is what I am doing in terms of the impact it makes on our world environment? but rather: how do I look, in the mirror of American domestic opinion, as I do it?<ref name=Kennan>{{citation
| first = George F. | last = Kennan
| title = Memoirs 1925-1950
| publisher = Little, Brown | year = 1967}}, pp. 53-54</ref></blockquote>


Westmoreland distrusted the Marine village-oriented policy as too defensive for Phase II--only offense can win a war, he insisted.<ref> The CIDG (Civilian Irregular Defense Groups) program was created for  the Montagnard peoples in the sparsely populated mountanous areas of the Central Highlands, by [[United States Army Special Forces]], sometimes working with the [[Central Intelligence Agency]].  The Montagnards disliked all Vietnamese, and had supported first the French, then the Americans. About 45,000 were enrolled in militias whose main role was defending their villages from the Communists. In 1970 the CIDG became part of the ARVN Rangers. Tucker, ed., [http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0195135253/ref=sib_dp_srch_pop?v=search-inside&keywords=mentagnard&go.x=0&go.y=0&go=Go!#  ''Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (2000) pp 74-75, 276-77 ]</ref>  Indeed, the tensions were high between the Army (which was in charge) and the Marines. Soldiers complained that the Marines were poorly trained, allowed too much authority to their NCOs, learned too little too late, and were too enamored of beach landings and frontal assaults. The Army was also jealous that the Marines had their own fixed-wing fighters that were under the control of ground commanders, giving them twice as much close air support as the Army got from the Air Force.  
Even when leaders' goals are sincere, the need to be seen as doing the popular thing can become counterproductive. There were many times, in the seemingly inexorable advance of decades of American involvement in Southeast Asia, where reflection might have led to caution. Instead, the need to be seen as active, as well as the clashes of strong egos, separate the needs of policy from the dictates of politics. The personalities of different Presidents and key advisers all had an effect. Many, but by no means all, of the key political decisions were under Johnson, but Presidents from Truman through Ford all had roles.


In 1968, Westmoreland sent his deputy [[Creighton Abrams]] to take command of I Corps, and gave his Air Force commander control of Marine aviation. The Marines protested vehemently but were rebuffed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.<ref>William C. Westmoreland, ''A Soldier Reports''  (1976), pp 164-66. Marine General Victor Krulak devotes ch 13 of his memoirs, ''First to Fight: An Inside View of the U.S. Marine Corps'' (1984) to the dispute. [http://books.google.com/books?id=3WegnB4hNP8C&pg=PA195&dq=marines+army+westmoreland+krulak&sig=ACfU3U3DCjpctKg9qwPJmkM8TtQ7wOSEgw#PPA195,M1 ''First to Fight'' pp 195-204 online]; see also Douglas Kinnard, ''The War Managers American Generals Reflect on Vietnam'' (1991) [http://books.google.com/books?id=D6BvIfyvxmMC&pg=PA60&dq=marines+army+westmoreland&sig=ACfU3U04bmb_yaYQ5192TCC4NyTjf6bm6Q discusses the tension on p 60-1, online]</ref>
Although Americans died in supporting South Vietnamese involvement beginning in 1962, the greatest U.S. involvement was from mid-1964 through 1972. U.S ground troops began reducing in 1968 and much more sharply in 1969. So, much of the detailed U.S. political action with other countries will be in [[Joint warfare in South Vietnam 1964-1968]], [[Vietnamization]], and [[air operations against North Vietnam]].


====Westmoreland vs. Taylor====
Vietnam's climate has a major effect on warfare, especially involving vehicles and aircraft.
Taylor's strategy was to use superior American mobility and firepower to locate, attack and destroy the Viet Cong main forces. Once they were destroyed, he reasoned, the villages would be easy to pacify. Westmoreland proposed instead a "search and destroy" strategy that would win the war by attrition. The idea was to track down and fight the larger Viet Cong units, hoping to grind them down faster than they could be replaced. The measure of success in a war of attrition was not battles won or territory held or villages pacified, it was the body count of dead enemy soldiers. (The body counts were wild guesses, since the enemy made a special effort to remove bodies, but MACV's analysts and McNamara's computers gobbled them up regardless.) A number of field commanders and CIA analysts found that a much better predictor was the number of weapons recovered from a battlefield.
Major operations usually took place in the dry season. While the most southern parts tend to have a generally tropical climate, there are two major climactic periods:
*Monsoon season of heat, rain, and mud, with limited mobility (May to September)
*Warm and dry conditions (October to March)


Westmoreland promised his three phase strategy could get the job done--whereas the defensive enclaves would prolong the conflict indefinitely into the future. Johnson could not wait forever, so he bought Westmoreland's plan and removed Taylor. The Marines stayed, but the Army never trusted them. The complaint was that the Marines were poorly trained, allowed too much authority to their NCOs, learned too little too late, and were too enamored of beach landings and frontal assaults. The Army was also jealous that the Marines had their own fixed-wing fighters that were under the control of ground commanders, giving them twice as much close air support as the Army got from the Air Force. In 1968, Westmoreland sent his deputy [[Creighton Abrams]] to take command of I Corps, and gave his Air Force commander control of Marine aviation. The Marines protested vehemently but were rebuffed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  
===Combat support advisory phase===
[[John F. Kennedy]] and his key staff, came from a different elite than that which had spawned the Cold Warriors of the Eisenhower Administration. While the form was different, a militant anti-Communism was underneath many of the Kennedy Administration policies. <ref name=Halberstam>{{citation
|  first = David | last = Halberstam
  | title = The Best and the Brightest
| publisher = Random House | year = 1972}}, pp. 121-122</ref> Its rougher operatives had a different style than [[Joe McCarthy]], but it is sometimes forgotten that Robert Kennedy (RFK) had been on McCarthy's staff. <ref>{{citation
| journal = Washington Monthly
| date = October  2000
| title = Bobby: Good, Bad, And In Between - Robert F. Kennedy
| first = Evan | last = Thomas
|url = http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_10_32/ai_66495287/print?tag=artBody;col1}}</ref>


Johnson had quietly committed the United States to a major venture. Containment was the original goal, but with the commitment itself came another goal--the nation's honor and credibility now had to be preserved.
Where Republicans during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations blamed Democrats who had "lost China", the Kennedy Administration was not out to lose anything. The first covert operations in the region began in the Eisenhower Administration, but Kennedy increased both operations in Laos and Vietnam.


Hanoi was stunned by Westmoreland's highly effective strategy. Once so close to easy victory, now it had to fall back and rethink strategy and tactics. General Vo Nguyen Giap, head of the PAVN since 1946, rushed fresh 500-man battalions down the Ho Chi Minh Trail before the full force of the US mobilization could take effect. The flow rose from 3,000 a month in 1965 to 8,000 a month throughout 1966 and 1967, and then 10,000 in 1968. By November 1965 the enemy had 110 battalions in the field, with 64,000 combat troops, 17,000 in combat support, and 54,000 part- time militia. It was too little too late.
===Intensification===
Guerrilla attacks increased in the early 1960s, at the same time as the new [[John F. Kennedy]] administration made Presidential decisions to increase its influence. Diem, as other powers were deciding their policies, was facing disorganized attacks and internal political dissent. There were conflicts between the government, dominated by minority Northern Catholics, and both the majority [[Vietnamese Buddhism|Buddhists]] and minorities such as the [[Montagnard]]s, [[Cao Dai]], and [[Hoa Hao]]. These conflicts were exploited, initially at the level of propaganda and recruiting, by stay-behind Viet Minh receiving orders from the North.


===First Divisional-strength Battle: Ia Drang, 1965=== 
U.S. personnel went into the field with ARVN personnel starting in 1962. The term "adviser" was popular but not always accurate. While many U.S. personnel indeed did advise their counterparts, and U.S. forces did not take a direct combat role, a substantial part of field activity was devoted to tactical airlift of ARVN troops, and a wide range of technical support. The first American soldier to die in combat was not with ARVN infantry, but part of a [[signals intelligence]] team, doing [[direction finding]] on Viet Cong radio transmitters in the field, whose team was ambushed.
{{seealso|Battle of the Ia Drang}}
At Ia Drang (river Drang) in late 1965 the first major confrontation shaped up between Giap and Westmoreland. Giap wanted to continue his successful guerrilla war, but was overruled by the Politburo; they demanded victory in a hurry. The new plan was for Giap to use three regiments, but with a new controlling divisional headquarters,  across the neck of SVN, cutting the country in two. The division threatened the Plei Me special forces camp with one regiment, but put a second regiment across the road over which South Vietnamese forces, without helicopters, would have to drive to Plei Me from the larger base in Pleiku. Intelligence identified the presence, but at first not the position, of a third regiment, which could attack Pleiku if the reserve based there went to the assistance of Plei Me.


The South Vietnamese recognized they were stretched too thin, and asked for U.S. help. The U.S. Field Force (corps equivalent) commander for the area, MG Stanley Larsen, told GEN Westmoreland that he thought the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) was ready, and got permission for it to use its mobility to bypass the road ambushes. Since the PAVN along the road had planned to ambush trucks, there was not an issue of not being able to find the relieving troops.  While the heliborne U.S. troopers could be heard miles away, their actual attack zones could not be determined until they swooped to a landing.  
Th [[Battle of Ap Bac]], fought on January 2, 1963, did involve both U.S. advisers to ARVN commanders, as well as U.S. aviation support. [[John Paul Vann]] was the senior tactical adviser, and his outrage about ARVN performance both stimulated aggressive investigative journalism, as well as infuriating the U.S. command.


It should be noted that the PAVN's practice of listening for helicopters was realized by Harold Moore, promoted to brigade command after leading a battalion in the Ia Drang. In the larger [[Battle of Bong Son]] approximately a month later, Moore used obvious helicopters to cause the PAVN to retreat onto very reasonable paths to break away from the Americans -- but different Americans had silently set ambushes, earlier, across those escape routes.
===Deterioration and reassessment===
By November 1963, after Diem was killed, there was mixed feelings among the JCS if covert operations alone could have a significant effect. <ref name=PntV3Ch01Sec1pp1-56>{{citation
| title =The Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition, Volume 3
| contribution = Chapter 1, "U.S. Programs in South Vietnam, Nov. 1963-Apr. 1965," Section 1, pp. 1-56
| url = http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon3/pent1.htm}}</ref> [[Chief of Staff of the Air Force]] GEN [[Curtis LeMay]] pushed his JCS colleagues for "more resolute, overt military actions." He was joined by Commandant of the Marine Corps GEN [[David Shoup]], and gained stronger support from the Army and Navy chiefs, GEN [[Earle Wheeler]] and ADM [[David McDonald]]. ADM [[Harry Felt]], commander of [[United States Pacific Command]], also believed covert actions alone would not be decisive.  LeMay said "we in the military felt we were not in the decision-making process at all [Chairman of the JCS Maxwell] Taylor might have been but we didn't agree with Taylor in most cases."<ref>McMaster, pp. 59-60</ref> 


Giap's well-camouflaged soldiers snuck in silently, carrying their supplies, hiding from reconnaissance during the day. They contested the helicopter landing zones, but never tried to hold ground; pitched battles were avoided, unless they could not break contact. In that case, it is true they did not try to hold ground, but they did try to kill as many Americans as possible, with seemingly little concern about their own losses. His tactics risked very high casualties, and necessitated intense political indoctrination and control of troops, and very light supply needs.  
To senior civilian officials, with the Joint Chiefs receiving it via Secretary of Defense McNamara, Johnson stated his policy decision in classified National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 273, of November 26, 1963. The key point was the U.S. goal was to strengthen South Vietnam to win its own contest; the U.S. expected to begin to withdraw troops. "It remains the central object of the United States in South Vietnam to assist the people and Government of that country to win their contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy. The test of all U.S. decisions and actions in this area should be the effectiveness of their contribution to this purpose.


The PAVN preferred hit-and-run [[ambush]]es, or what they called "catch and grab." When their retreat was blocked, their next tactic was called
He made pacification of the Mekong Delta the highest priority, but also ordered planning for increased yet deniable activity against North Vietnam. "With respect to Laos, a plan should be developed and submitted for approval by higher authority for military operations up to a line up to 50 kilometers inside Laos, together with political plans for minimizing the international hazards of such an enterprise." These operations would change from CIA to MACV control. A "favorable influence", but no operations in, Cambodia was desired.  
"hugging the belt" <ref name=Moore>{{citation
| first1 = Harold | last1 = Moore | first2=Joseph
| title = We were soldiers once, and young: Ia Drang--The Battle That Changed The War In Vietnam
| publisher = Random House| year = 1992}}</ref> the Americans would not dare calling in artillery and gunships because of the risk of friendly fire casualties. The surprise attack would give a short window of opportunity before superior American mobility could be brought to bear.  


Hanoi had to accept far more casualties than Washington. North Vietnam was a very poor country that got poorer during the 1960s; all it could produce was manpower. Its weapons had to be captured or imported from Russia and China. Its transportation system was so bad that a large fraction of its military effort had to be devoted to getting a few rounds of ammunition or a few small caliber weapons to the front.  
A high priority was producing "as strong and persuasive a case as possible to demonstrate to the world the degree to which the Viet Cong is controlled, sustained and supplied from Hanoi, through Laos and other channels."<ref name=NSAM>{{citation
| author = [[Lyndon B. Johnson]]
| title = National Security Action Memorandum 273: South Vietnam
| date = November 26, 1963
| url = http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/Johnson/archives.hom/NSAMs/nsam273.asp}}</ref>


Giap was surprised that the U.S. and RVN knew the positions of two of his three regiments, and had an approximate location for the third. PAVN launched a series of violent attacks against the Americans, who clustered around their landing zones. In a war without fixed lines the choppers multiplied the strength of American infantry and provided a new magnitude of mobility that frustrated Giap's tactics. Only four choppers were shot down. Heavy doses of tactical air power, including [[B-52# Vietnam|area, then radar-controlled]] saturation bombing from B-52s, overwhelmed the PAVN. The invasion was stopped; the survivors fled back into their Cambodian sanctuaries. "By God, they sent us over here to kill Communists and that's what we're doing!" exulted one battalion commander. Giap excused his failure by saying he only wanted to discover the American's tactics; he convinced the Politburo that it was necessary to return to low-level guerrilla tactics (force the Yankees to "eat rice with chopsticks") because he could not beat the Americans in battle. The 101st Airborne Division converted to an airmobile formation, but the true airmobile structure was not used by other units. Nevertheless, helicopter augmentation became far more common.
The JCS responded to NSAM 273 with a January 22, 1964 memorandum to McNamara. Significant differences with the Presidential decision, which emphasized assisting South Vietnam, was a JCS goal of "victory" as the goal of U.S. military operations.


==Westmoreland selects new tactics==
===Gulf of Tonkin Incident===
The tide had turned, and Westmoreland called for more troops and helicopters to enlarge the search and destroy operation across the country. McNamara and LBJ agreed, doubling the number of infantry maneuver battalions from 35 in October 1965 (22 Army, 13 Marines) to 70 a year later (50 and 20). The number of artillery battalions also doubled to 79. By the end of 1966 the US Army had 244,000 personnel in Vietnam, the Marines 69,000, Air Force 57,000 and Navy 25,000, a total of 395,000. They faced 100,000 enemy riflemen in 152 combat battalions and two hundred separate companies. The doubling of combat forces, Washington realized, would entail a doubling of US losses from 400 deaths a month to 800. 
[[Image:NH 96349.jpg|thumb|right|300px|{{NH 96349.jpg/credit}}<br />Track chart of USS ''Maddox'' (DD-731) and three North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats, during their action on 2 August 1964. Attacks by aircraft from [[USS Ticonderoga (CV-14)|USS ''Ticonderoga'' (CVA-14)]] are also shown.]]
[[Image:Viet-patrol.jpg|thumb|325px|Infantry Patrol in a Clearing, U.S. Army combat painting by Roger Blum, 1966]]
Most of the fighting in Vietnam was done by companies that deliberately went in harms way for a couple days at a time-- into the jungles of the Central Highlands, or the rice paddies of the heavily populated lowlands. As Marine Lt. Philip Caputo observed, "There was no pattern to these patrols and operations. Without a front, flanks or rear, we fought a formless war against a formless enemy who evaporated like the morning jungle mists, only to materialize in some unexpected place."<ref> Philip Caputo 88</ref>  
===Number and causes of casualties===
Of two million small unit operations, 99% never encountered the enemy. What are now called [[improvised explosive devices]], "booby traps" at the time, and [[land mines]] together caused a third of American deaths. The war was fought out in the other one percent, and most of the time combat was initiated by "Charlie" (the Viet Cong). The "hot landing zone" (enemy attacking choppers as they landed) accounted for 13% of the fights. American platoons on patrol were hit by ambush in 23% of the engagements, and their camps were hit by rocket or grenade attacks in 30%. In 27% of the battles the Americans took the initiative, including 9% ambushes, 5% planned attacks on known positions, and 13% attacks on unsuspected enemy positions. In 7% of the engagements both sides were surprised as they stumbled upon each other in the jungle.  


The casualties mounted. By the end of the war, 30,600 soldiers and 12,900 Marines had been killed in combat (together with 1,400 sailors and Navy pilots, and 1,000 Air Force fliers.) Nine times out of ten the enemy took heavier casualties and retreated, especially when gunships showed up. They could not win, they could scarcely replace their losses, yet they kept trudging down the Ho Chi Minh Trail day after day.
On August 2, 1964, a DESOTO Patrol destroyer (USS ''Maddox'', DD-731) was believed to have been approached, and possibly fired upon, by the North Vietnamese. After much declassification and study, the incident largely remains shrouded in what German military theorist [[Carl von Clausewitz]] has called the "fog of war," but questions have been raised about whether the North Vietnamese believed they were under attack, about who fired the first shots, and, indeed, if there was a true attack. There has not been a clear indication from the North Vietnamese if they thought the DESOTO and 34A operations were part of the same programs, and, if so, if destroyer-sized vessels represented an escalation. Later on the 2nd, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, [[Maxwell Taylor]], ordered that DESOTO patrols should not be made at the same time as 34A operations.  


===Communist concept of attrition and American understanding of it===
There is some question as to whether the second patrol (increased to two ships with air cover) was actually attacked, or if there were merely North Vietnamese warships in their area. Declassified NSA intercepts of North Vietnamese communications, on the 4th, show considerable confusion on the DRV side. Operating under Presidential authority, Johnson launched Operation PIERCE ARROW (air strikes against North Vietnamese naval facilities and the oil refinery at Vinh) on the evening of the 4th (Washington time), and gave a speech regarding the same approximately 90 minutes before the Navy aircraft reached their targets.<ref name=McMaster>{{citation
The enemy, however, was willing to accept those casualties. <ref name=Adams>{{citation
  | title = Dereliction of Duty : Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam
| author = Adams, Sam
  | first = H.R. | last = McMaster
  | title = War of Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir
  | publisher = HarperCollins
| publisher = Steerforth Press | year= 1994}}</ref> McNamara was insistent that the enemy would comply with his concepts of cost-effectiveness, of which Ho and Giap were unaware. They were, however, quite familiar with attritional strategies.<ref name=Giap>{{citation
  | year = 1997 | isbn=0060187956
| title = People's War People's Army: The Viet Cong Insurrection Manual for Underdeveloped Countries
}}</ref>  
| author = Vo Nguyen Giap
| publisher = University Press of the Pacific | year =2001}}</ref> While they were not politically Maoist, they were also well versed in Mao's concepts of protracted war (see [[insurgency]]).<ref name=MaoProtracted>{{citation
  | url = http://www.marx2mao.com/Mao/PW38.html
| author = Mao Tse-tung
  | title = On Protracted War
  | work = Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung
| publisher = Foreign Languages Press
| year = 1967
}}</ref>
==U.S. technology, equipment and techniques==
===Helicopters and Air Mobility=== 
{{seealso|Air Assault}}
The ability to move quickly into battle, during battle, and away from battle has always been a critical advantage in warfare. Once, troops on horses had an immense mobility advantage over those who did not. Later, motorized (truck-borne) and mechanized (in tracked, often armored, fighting vehicles) demonstrated advantages over horse cavalry, although motorized forces were restricted to roads, and, while horses sometimes could graze, far more grass grows than does petroleum.


Using helicopters and light aircraft for tactical troop movement was inspired by the Korean War, but first used, in moderate strength, in the 1950s by the French in Algeria. The U.S. military had been studying the concept, but, justas the traditional horse cavalry had resisted armored cavalry, it made limited headway.  
President Johnson asked for, and received, Congressional authority to use military force in Vietnam after the [[Gulf of Tonkin Incident]], which was described as a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. warships. Congress did not "declare war," which is its responsibility under the Constitution; nevertheless, it launched what effectively was at the time the longest war in U.S. history, and even longer if the covert actions before the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin situation are included. The [[Gulf of Tonkin Resolution]], although later revoked, was considered by Lyndon Johnson as his basic authority to conduct military operations in Southeast Asia. It serves as an example of how outright declarations of war have become extremely rare since the [[Second World War]].
[[Image:Viet-ch-47b.jpg|thumb|275px|Chinook CH-47 delivering 105mm howitzer and ammunition]]
When the Kennedy Administration took office, [[Secretary of Defense]] [[Robert S. McNamara]] made exploration of new ways of mobility a high priority. In 1962, he expressed dissatisfaction with Army conservative, and created a [[Air assault#Division level evaluation: the Howze Board|well-funded research organization]] to evaluate extensive air mobility. While it had a formal name, it was generally called the Howze Board after its chief, [[Hamilton H. Howze]].


With McNamara's support, the Board revised its recommendations to create a helicopter-borne combat unit of [[division]] size. Large-scale field tests proved it could be effective in battle, and the 1st Cavalry Division (1st Cav) was redesignated the 1st Cavalry Division (airmobile) and sent to Vietnam in July 1965. There had been moderately successful tests in Vietnam by the 173rd Airborne Brigade, arriving in May and first fighting in June, but it became clear that the approach used by the 173rd, attaching helicopters for each mission, was not nearly as effective as a unit that had infantry and helicopters training together as a team. This teaming was a basic aspect of the 1st Cav, which first went into combat in the [[Battle of the Ia Drang]] in October 1965.
===Beginning of air operations===
[[Image:Boeing B-52 bombing run.jpg|thumb|right|300px|{{Boeing B-52 bombing run.jpg/credit}}<br />A U.S. Air Force [[B-52 Superfortress|Boeing B-52F-70-BW ''Stratofortress'']] drops Mk 117 750 lb (340 kg) bombs over Vietnam, ''circa'' 1965-1966.]]
Immediately after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, there was a period of retaliation for specific attacks, [[Operation FLAMING DART]], and then a steady but incremental pressure under [[Operation Rolling Thunder]] operations against North Vietnam. There was also extensive air support overtly inside South Vietnam, and, at different times, in Laos and Cambodia; some of these are discussed above in the section on covert activity.


In the 1st Cav, there were scouts in very light observation helicopters ([[OH-6]]), light  "Huey" helicopters ([[UH-1]]) that could carry 10-12 soldiers into battle or deliver machine gun and rocket fire in direct support, and medium ([[CH-47]]) and large ([[CH-54]]) helicopters that could lift [[artillery]] into firebases supporting the heliborne infantry.
From a current doctrinal standpoint, these campaigns should be evaluated according to an examination of air operations relying on a planning model at the level of [[operational art]]. This model distinguishes ''effectiveness'', or the results of the campaign, from the tactical aspects of weapons ''effects''.  Several factors need to be considered to determine effectiveness. The campaigns in Laos and Cambodia were far more effective than [[Operation Rolling Thunder]], as they were not executed as a subtle means of "signaling", but had clear objectives measurable in military terms. The objectives here, as well as in [[Operation Linebacker I]], were military. [[Operation Linebacker II]] also was effective, but it had well-defined objectives at the level of grand strategy: [[compellence]] to return to negotiations. <ref name=JP5-0>{{citation
|title = Department of Defense Joint Publication 5-0: Joint Operation Planning
|author = [[Joint Chiefs of Staff]]
| date = 13 February 2008
|url = http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/new_pubs/jp5_0.pdf}}</ref>
#What conditions are required to achieve the objectives?
#What sequence of actions is most likely to create those conditions?
#What resources are required to accomplish that sequence of actions?
#What is the likely cost or risk in performing that sequence of actions?


Using scouts and infantry to locate the enemy, and call in artillery and air strikes, was one airmobile tactic.  Another was to harass and attrit the enemy with a series of stinging [[ambush]]es and [[raid]]s, using a doctrine now considered [[swarming (military)|swarming]]. In these and other cases, however, the division name was appropriately chosen -- these were more classically cavalry rather than infantry missions.
===Major ground combat phase===
[[Image:Viet-huey.jpg|thumb|325px|left|UH–1 Hueys pick up soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division during operations on the Bong Son Plain in 1966]]
{{seealso|Vietnam War military technology}}
Depending on the tactical situation, a LZ might be prepared by artillery, air strikes, or escorting armed helicopters. Since the suppressive fire did not always drive off defenders, there was a balance of stealth vs. fire; small insertions sometimes had the helicopters make several decoy landings, silently landing a team at one quick stopthe first infantry companies landed in "slicks." These were unarmed Bell [[UH-1|UH-1D]] "Hueys" that could carry 12 men and their gear.  
Secretary of Defense [[Robert McNamara]], who had been appointed by Kennedy, became Johnson's principal adviser, and continued to push an economic and signaling grand strategy. Johnson and McNamara, although it would be hard to find two men of more different personality, formed a quick bond. McNamara appeared more impressed by economics and Schelling's [[compellence]] theory <ref name=Carlson2005>{{citation
| title = The Failure of Coercive Diplomacy: Strategy Assessment for the 21st Century
| first = Justin | last = Carlson
| journal = Hemispheres: Tufts Journal of International Affairs
| url = http://ase.tufts.edu/hemispheres/2005/Carlson.doc}}</ref> than by Johnson's liberalism or Senate-style deal-making, but they agreed in broad policy.
<ref name=>{{citation
| title = Deterrence Now
  | first = Patrick M. | last = Morgan
| year = 2003
| publisher = Cambridge University Press
| url =http://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/22572/sample/9780521822572ws.pdf}}</ref>


Fire bases were set up with medium Boeing [[CH-47]] "Chinook" helicopters, which could transport the 2-ton 105mm light howitzers, light vehicles, and ammunition; the larger [[CH-54]] Tarhe ("the hook") lifted the larger 8-ton 155mm medium howitzers that gave the firebase enormous killing power. Generally, the greater mobility of the 105, and the quick availability of armed helicopters and jet fighter-bombers, made 155s and heavier [[howitzer]]s less important, unless they were already in a semipermanent base.  
They directed a [[Joint warfare in South Vietnam 1964-1968|plan for South Vietnam]] that they believed would end the war quickly. Note that the initiative was coming from Washington; the unstable [[Government of the Republic of Vietnam|South Vietnamese government]] was not part of defining their national destiny. The plan selected was from GEN [[William Westmoreland]], the field commander in Vietnam.  


Command and control could be very good or very bad. Company-sized forces would often land with their commanding captains, and, as with Moore at X-Ray, sometimes with more senior officers. When the levels of command did not micromanage, a battalion commander (lieutenant colonel) or higher commander could keep an overview of the engagement, and bring in reinforcements, as well as air and artillery strikes, as appropriate.
This model regarded the enemy forces in the field as the opposing [[centers of gravity (military)|center of gravity]], as opposed to the local security and development of [[pacification]]. The enemy, however, had a different idea of centers of gravity; see [[Vietnamese Communist grand strategy]].
[[Image:Viet-105.jpg|thumb|250px|right|A battery of 105-mm. howitzers from the 25th Infantry Division uses high-angle fire in the western highlands]]


There were times, however, where the captain might stay airborne, the lieutenant colonel a bit higher, the colonel commanding the brigade at the next altitude, and possibly the major general division commander and lieutenant general corps commander in their own command and control helicopters. When this turned into micromanagement, it was said, ruefully, "never, in the course of human events, have so many, been so supervised, by so few."
Over time, the U.S. developed tactics increasingly appropriate to the environment and foe, given the Westmoreland's assumption that the center of gravity was the enemy main force. Some of the early operations included:
{{r|Operation ATTLEBORO}}
{{r|Operation Starlight}}
{{r|Operation CEDAR FALLS}}
{{r|Operation JUNCTION CITY}}
There were many such operations, variously by U.S. only, U.S. and ARVN, and ARVN forces. The term "search and destroy" was often used to describe ground operations against [[Viet Cong]] and [[People's Army of Viet Nam]] troops.


Meanwhile the whole operation was covered by helicopter gunships--"Hueys" equipped with rockets, grenade launchers and door-mounted machine guns. Although its maximum speed was only 127 mph, the Huey could dart and dive and swerve with enough agility to evade most ground fire. [[Close air support]] from fixed-wing fighter-bombers was readily available.
The [[UH-1]] "Huey", as well as other types of [[helicopter]]s, are iconic of the Vietnam War. The full capabilities of units with integrated helicopter support were shown by the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) at the [[Battle of the Ia Drang]] and the [[Battle of Bong Son]].


===Individual equipment===
These operations continued, some joint with ARVN troops and some by U.S. and third country forces alone. [[Australia|Australian]] units, integrated into large U.S. forces, were highly regarded. Less mobile but potent [[division (military)|divisions]] came from [[South Korea]] and [[Thailand]].
Equipment for the individual soldier changed. For some time, there had been an international debate over conventional rather than "assault" rifles. The conventional rifle, such as the [[M-1 Garand]], fired a high-power bullet, had a relatively small magazine, and was best for carefully aimed fire. Assault rifles were an evolution of the less than successful [[submachine gun]]s of WWII, which fired a low-power pistol bullet, continuously or in bursts. Assault rifles, such as the U.S. [[M-16]] or Soviet [[AK-47]] fired an intermediate power bullet from a large magazine, sometimes in continuous bursts. Many Communist soldiers used the [[SKS]], inferior to the M-16 and AK-47 for use in the conditions of Vietnam.


A consideration for the U.S. was that the M-14 rifle, which had replaced the M-1, was too heavy for many of the smaller Vietnamese allies. The M-16's smaller (5.56mm vs. 7.62mm) bullet allowed a soldier to carry more ammunition, and the trend had been away from carefully aimed fire to suppressive fire that froze the enemy until air and artillery could hit him.
Immense fire support, from ground and air platforms, supported these operations. Close air support both from [[fighter aircraft|fighter-bombers]] and early [[armed helicopter]]s was common, but new techniques came into wide use. [[ARC LIGHT]] was the general code name for operations using [[B-52]] heavy bombers against targets in South Vietnam. The term grew to encompass B-52 operations against targets in Cambodia and Laos, principally against the [[Ho Chi Minh trail]]. B-52 use in the major [[Operation Linebacker I]] and [[Operation Linebacker II]] operations against North Vietnam are generally not considered ARC LIGHT missions; see the respective operations.


The new M-16 rifle was a shorter, lighter and more versatile assault weapon than the old M-1 or its replacement the M-14. It fired a light bullet at high muzzle velocity, which gave great killing power at ranges under 400 yards. Its rapid fire made it ideal in ambushes, although variations from the designed ammunition, as well as training problems and some mechanical problems, made early versions less reliable than the Communist AK-47. Both the AK-47 and M-16 had advantages and disadvantages; neither was the ideal infantry rifle. The 5.56mm bullet did not always penetrate jungle.
There were also technical measures to clear jungle, both mechanical and chemical. See [[Vietnam War military technology]].


Another individual weapon was a 40mm grenade, which could be fired farther than a hand grenade could be thrown. The grenades could be launched from a [[grenade#M-79|M-79]] single-shot weapon, rather like a large shotgun and able to fire a shotgun-like round. Alternatively, the [[grenade#M-203|M-203]] launcher attached to the underside of a M-16 rifle, below the barrel. Limited use was made of a hand-cranked automatic grenade launcher, the [[grenade#Mark 19|Mark 19]], primarily on river patrol boats or vehicle-borne troops as it was too heavy for foot soldiers. Other versions were used on helicopters.
Unquestionably, Westmoreland's approach inflicted immense casualties on the enemy forces. Even so, the North Vietnamese seemed willing to accept them. During the second half of 1967, the North Vietnamese intensified operations in the border regions of South Vietnam, in at least regimental strength. Unlike the usual hit-and-run tactics used by communist forces, these were sustained and bloody affairs. Beginning at [[Battle of Khe Sanh#Battle of Con Thien|Con Thien]] and [[Battle of Khe Sanh#Battle of Song Be|Song Be]] in October 1967, then at [[Battle of Khe Sanh#Battle of Dak To|Dak To]]


The M-60 medium [[machine gun]] was powerful and reliable, but suffered from the logistical problem of using different ammunition (7.62mm) than the M-16. In modern U.S. infantry, it has been replaced by the M-249 squad automatic weapon firing 5.56mm.
There had long been fighting in the [[Battle of Khe Sanh|Khe Sanh]] area, but the North Vietnamese greatly intensified their attacks in early January 1968, before the [[Tet Offensive]]. They continued operations there until April.


===Heavy weapons===
===Tet Offensive===
Beyond what was available from armed helicopters and from fighter-bombers, fire from 105mm [[howitzer]]s, relatively easy for medium helicopters to lift, was invaluable. 155mm howitzers could be lifted by the heaviest helicopters, but were more likely to be moved, by ground, to a firebase. The long-range [[203mm howitzer|8" howitzer]] and [[175mm gun]] were only road-mobile, but had sufficient range that their presence did not alert the enemy to impending operations in a specific area.
By 1968, and perhaps in 1967, Johnson's chief adviser on the war, McNamara, had increasingly less faith in the Johnson-Westmoreland model. McNamara quotes GEN [[William DuPuy]], Westmoreland's chief planner, as recognizing that as long as the enemy could fight from the sanctuaries of Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam, it was impossible to bring adequate destruction on the enemy, and the model was inherently flawed.<ref name>Gen. William E Dupuy, August 1, 1988 interview, quoted by McNamara, pages 212 and 371.</ref>


Especially for night defense of fixed positions such as Special Forces/CIDG camps, fixed-wing gunships, originally "Puff, the Magic Dragon," an Air Force [[AC-47]] transport fitted with three miniguns firing 100 bullets per second, provided critical illumination, as well as an ability to deliver massive amounts of machine gun fire. The fixed-wing gunship idea worked well and continued to improve; the first versions of the modern [[AC-130]] were later deployed in Vietnam. AC-130 aircraft were used, most heavily, against the Ho Chi Minh trail.  Fire control methods of the time made use of the fixed-wing gunships dangerous in close proximity to friendly forces at location that was not precisely known; Special Forces camps' position was known.   
Opposition against him peaked in  1968; see [[Tet Offensive]].  On March 31, 1968, Johnson said on national television, <blockquote>"I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president"</blockquote>
===Airmobile operations===
In mid-1965, the 11th Air Assault Division (Test), the experimental force in AIR ASSAULT II, was reflagged as the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) and sent to Vietnam. Their first assignment was to crush Giap's buildup around the Ia Drang river; there are indications that Giap intended to meet the 1st Cav and learn techniques to fight the airmobile forces. LTG (ret) Hal Moore, then commanding 1/7 Cavalry (the Custer squadron) at a place called [[Air assault#First U.S. Combat Deployments|Landing Zone XRay]], took and gave  heavy casualties, and considers the engagement a draw. Nevertheless, the overall Ia Drang operation stopped what appeared to be a division-sized operation to take control of an important area of the Central Highlands.


The 1st Cav learned lessons in the Ia Drang in October and November 1965, and refined its techniques at the [[Battle of Bong Son]] in December through February.<ref name=Galvin>{{citation
In March, Johnson had also announced a bombing halt, in the interests of starting talks. The first discussions were limited to starting broader talks, as a ''quid-pro-quo'' for a bombing halt.:<ref name=Kissinger>{{citation
  | title = Air Assault: the development of airmobile warfare
  | author = [[Henry Kissinger]]
  | first = John R. | last = Galvin
  | title = Ending the Vietnam War: A history of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War|publisher=Simon & Schuster|year =1973}}, p. 50</ref>
| publisher = Hawthorn Books | year = 1969}}</ref>


Well handled airmobile forces could dominate at the tactical and operational levels, but neither they nor the [[United States Air Force]] could hold ground. While U.S. forces could deliver massive casualties, Giap was quite prepared to fight an attritional strategy, aimed at U.S. opinion.  COL (ret.) Harry Summers, a U.S. Army historian and strategist, is said to have said to a North Vietnamese counterpart during talks, "We never lost a battle."  The DRV colonel said "true, but irrelevant."
===Vietnamization phase===
During the Presidential campaign, a random wire service story headlined that Nixon had a "secret plan for ending the war, but, in reality, Nixon was only considering alternatives at this point. He remembered how Eisenhower had deliberately leaked, to the Communist side in the [[Korean War]], that he might be considering using nuclear weapons to break the deadlock. Nixon adapted this into what he termed the "Madman Strategy".<ref>Karnow, p. 582</ref>


By 1968 infantry divisions routinely used 200 choppers, and could call on Corps headquarters for more as needed. The Air Force watched nervously as the Army experimented with its new doctrine and deployed 3,600 choppers to Vietnam. The Air Force ridiculed helicopters as low performance, high-risk machines that were excessively vulnerable to ground fire, and hopelessly inferior to its own fixed-wing jet fighters. Most of all it hated having the Army building up its own air power, which it had fought at the 1948 Key West Agreement (see [[Air Assault]]). Helicopters flew over 20 million combat and 30 million non-combat sorties, and proved the single most useful weapons system of the war.  
He told [[H. R. Haldeman]], one of his closest aides, <blockquote>"I call it the madman theory, Bob.I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I've reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry, and he has his hand on the nuclear button, and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace."<ref name=Madman>{{citation
| title = Nixon's madman strategy | first = James | last = Carroll  | date =  June 14, 2005 | journal = Boston Globe | url = http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/06/14/nixons_madman_strategy/}}</ref></blockquote>
====Nixon decisionmaking structure====
After the election of [[Richard M. Nixon]], a review of U.S. policy in Vietnam was the first item on the national security agenda. [[Henry Kissinger]], the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, asked all relevant agencies to respond with their assessment, which they did on March 14, 1969.<ref>Kissinger, p. 50</ref>


Military aircraft are inherently dangerous, especially at low altitude where helicopters often operated. Most jet aircraft have the gliding performance of a brick when they lose power. A helicopter that loses power, but maintains the integrity of its rotors, is at a few thousand feet of altitude, and has a competent pilot, can "autorotate" to a landing, the airflow of the fall spinning the rotors and generating lift. At low altitude, there is no time to generate that lift. Jet fighters do have ejection seats to blast pilots clear of an impending crash, where helicopter crews have neither ejection seats nor parachutes.
"Controlling the policy were a small group of men, President Richard M. Nixon, and which included the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs, Henry A. Kissinger; the President’s Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs, Major General Alexander M. Haig; and a few National Security Council officials trusted by Kissinger."<ref name=FRUS-VIII>{{citation
| title = Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976
| volume = Volume VIII, Vietnam
| date = January–October 1972
| url = http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v08/media/pdf/frus1969-76v08.pdf
| publisher = Office of the Historian, [[U.S. Department of State]]}}</ref>  Admiral [[Thomas Moorer]], [[Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff]]; [[Director of Central Intelligence]] [[Richard Helms]], and Ambassador [[Ellsworth Bunker]] also were involved, but [[Secretary of Defense]] [[Melvin Laird]] and [[Secretary of State]] [[William Rogers]] were rarely part of the inner discussions.


8,000 went down during the war, killing 3,000 in combat operations and another 2,200 in accidents. (Most of the casualties were passengers; 700 pilots were killed.)
====Policy toward SVN====
===Medical support===
U.S. policy changed to one of turning ground combat over to South Vietnam, a process called [[Vietnamization]], a term coined in January 1969. Nixon, in contrast, saw resolution not just in Indochina, in a wider scope. He sought Soviet support, saying that if the Soviet Union helped bring the war to an honorable conclusion, the U.S. would "do something dramatic" to improve U.S.-Soviet relations. <ref name=Kissinger>{{citation
Immense improvements over even Korean War field medicine, of M*A*S*H fame, were a great morale factor. <ref name=Neel>{{citation
| author = [[Henry Kissinger]]
  | title = Vietnam Studies: Medical Support of the U.S. Army in Vietnam 1965-1970
  | title = Ending the Vietnam War: A history of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War|publisher=Simon & Schuster|year =1973}}, p. 103</ref> In worldwide terms, Vietnamization replaced the earlier [[containment policy]]<ref>Kissinger, pp. 27-28</ref> with [[detente]].<ref>Kissinger, pp. 249-250</ref> Also in 1969, both overt and covert [[Paris Peace Talks]] began.
| first = Spurgeon | last = Neel
| publisher = Center for Military History, U.S. Department of the Army
| year = 1991
| url = http://www.history.army.mil/books/Vietnam/MedSpt/MedSpt-FM.htm}}</ref> They involved several key factors:
#Rapid helicopter evacuation, with more advanced medical technicians, from the battlefield
#Mobile trauma hospitals a short distance from the battlefield
#Improved medical understanding of trauma management, especially aggressive prevention of shock and related respiratory conditions, rather than treating those often-lethal complications once they had developed.


"Dust Off" medical evacuation [[UH-1 Huey]] helicopters. promptly removed the wounded from the battlefield, and to an advanced trauma hospital system. Medevac runs had the highest priority, and were unusually dangerous. Two medevac pilots won the Congressional Medal of Honor for their heroism. It took on average 100 minutes to rush a casualty to the nearest field hospital. 390,000 American and ARVN casualties were medevaced. Thanks to quick hospitalization and aggressive prevention of traumatic shock and the acute respiratory distress syndrome, 82% of the seriously wounded who arrived at hospitals survived, a sharp improvement over previous wars due to helicopters, as well as significant advances in trauma management.
While Nixon hesitated to authorize a military request to bomb Cambodian sanctuaries, which civilian analysts considered less important than Laos, he authorized, in March, bombing of Cambodia as a signal to the North Vietnamese. While direct attack against North Vietnam, as was later done in [[Operation Linebacker I]], might be more effective, he authorized the [[Operation MENU]] bombing of Cambodia, starting on March 17. These bombings were kept secret from the U.S. leadership and electorate; the North Vietnamese clearly knew they were being bombed. It first leaked to the press in May, and Nixon ordered warrantless surveillance of key staff. <ref>Karnow, p. 591-592</ref>


==Ground war 1966-68==
Nixon also directed [[Cyrus Vance]] to go to Moscow in March, to encourage the Soviets to put pressure on the North Vietnamese to open negotiations with the U.S. <ref>Kissinger, pp. 75-78</ref> The Soviets, however, either did not want to get in the middle, or had insufficient leverage on the North Vietnamese.
With more aggressive pursuit, including airmobile operations, Westmoreland's tactics worked in terms of defeating the threat of larger enemy units (i.e., [[battalion]] or larger) to South Vietnam.  With the US increasing the pace of search and destroy (and the ARVN avoiding combat), the NLF was systematically pushed back. "Search and Destroy" gave way after 1968 to "clear and hold", when [[Creighton Abrams]] replaced Westmoreland.


The Viet Cong was forced to disperse into smaller and smaller units, and so too did the US forces, until they were running platoon and even squad operations that blanketed far more of the countryside, chasing the fragmented enemy back into remote, uninhabited areas or out of the South altogether. Not only low-level NLF sympathizers but even Viet Cong officers and NLF political cadres started to surrender, accepting the resettlement terms offered by the GVN. At the end of 1964, the Pentagon estimated that only 42% of the South Vietnamese people lived in cities or villages that were securely under GVN control. (20% were in villages controlled by the NLF, and 37% were in contested zones.) At the end of 1967, 67% of the population was "secure," and only a few remote villages with less than 2% of the population were still ruled by the NLF.  
===Final air support phase===
In the transition to full "[[Vietnamization]]," U.S. and third country ground troops turned ground combat responsibility to the [[Army of the Republic of Vietnam]]. Air and naval combat, [[combat support]], and [[combat service support]] from the U.S. continued. While the ARVN improved in local security and small operations, [[Operation Lam Son 719]], in February 1971, the first large operation with only ARVN ground forces, they took casualties that the South Vietnamese leadership considered unacceptable, and withdrew.  This operation still had U.S. helicopters lifting the crews, and U.S. intelligence and artillery support.  


Hanoi seemed to believe that the rugged Central Highlands region (South Vietnamese Military Region II, also known as RVN II Corps), which contained a third of the area but only 7% of SVN's people, would make a good base for guerrilla warfare. [[United States Army Special Forces]] ("Green Berets") armed and led the Montagnard tribesmen against the Communists.  
They did much better against the 1972 Eastertide invasion, but this still involved extensive U.S. air support.  To stop the logistical support of the Eastertide invasion, Nixon launched [[Operation Linebacker I]], with the [[operational art|operational goal]] of disabling the infrastructure of infiltration. One of the problems of the Republic of Vietnam's Air Force is that it never operated under central control, even for a specific maximum-effort air offensive. South Vietnamese aircraft always were controlled by regional corps commanders, so never developed skills in deep [[battlefield air interdiction]].  


In 1967, the Saigon political scene stabilized, as the Buddhist and student protesters ran out of steam and General [[Nguyen Van Thieu]] (1923-2001), a competent, fiercely anti-Communist Catholic, became president (in office 1967-75). The NLF failed to disrupt the national legislative election of 1966, or the presidential elections of 1967, which consolidated Thieu-ARVN control over GVN. Thieu failed to eliminate the systematic politicization, corruption, time-serving and favoritism in the ARVN.
When the North refused to return to negotiations in late 1972, Nixon, in mid-December, ordered bombing at an unprecedented level of intensity, [[Operation Linebacker II]]. This was at the [[military strategy|strategic]] and [[grand strategy|grand strategic]] levels, attacking not so much the infiltration infrastructure, but North Vietnam's ability to import supplies, its internal transportation and logistics, command and control, and [[integrated air defense system]]. Within a month of the start of the operation, a peace agreement was signed.
===Pacification/Revolutionary Development===
RVN and MACV operated two different wars, although Westmoreland was principally interested only in overt military operations, while Abrams looked at a broader picture. MACV advisors did work closely with 900,000 local GVN officials in a well-organized pacification program called CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development.) It stressed technical aid, local self government, and land distribution to peasant farmers. A majority of tenant farmers received title to their own land in one of the most successful transfer projects in any nation. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of peasants entered squalid refugee camps when CORDS moved them out of villages that could not be protected.<ref> Thomas W. Scoville, ''Reorganizing for pacification support'' (1982) [http://www.history.army.mil/books/pacification_spt/index.htm online edition]</ref> In the [[Phoenix Program]] (part of CORDS with a strong CIA component) GVN police identified and arrested (and sometimes killed) the NLF secret police agents engaged in assassination. 
===Psychological tension and breakdown of discipline===
The more the American soldiers worked in the hamlets, the more they came to despise the corruption, inefficiency and even cowardice of GVN and ARVN.  The basic problem was that despite the decline of the NLF, the GVN still failed to pick up popular support. Most peasants, refugees and city people remained alienated and skeptical. The superior motivation of the enemy troubled the Americans (especially in contrast with South Koreans, who fought fiercely for their independence.) "Why can't our Vietnamese do as well as Ho's?" Soldiers resented the peasants (ridiculing them as "gooks") who seemed sullen, unappreciative, unpatriotic and untrustworthy. The Viet Cong resorted more and more to booby-traps that (during the whole war) killed about 4,000 Americans and injured perhaps 30,000 (and killed or injured many thousands of peasants.)


It became more and more likely that after an ambush or boobytrap angry GIs would take out their frustrations against the nearest Vietnamese they perceived as potential enemies. MACV did not appreciate the danger that atrocities might be committed by Americans. In March 1968, just after the Tet offensive, one Army company massacred several hundred women and children at the hamlet of My Lai. High ranking American officers wre not charged, but the company captain was tried and acquitted. Platoon commander Lt. William Calley (a junior college dropout who was rushed through OCS) was sentenced to life imprisonment by a 1971 court martial. His sentence was reduced and he was released in 1975. The case became a focus of national guilt and self-doubt, with antiwar leaders alleging there were many atrocities that had been successfully covered up.<ref> Michal R. Belknap, ''The Vietnam War on Trial: The My Lai Massacre and the Court-Martial of Lieutenant Calley'' (2002). [http://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-War-Trial-Court-Martial-Lieutenant/dp/0700612122/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215301180&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/mylai.htm "Famous American Trials: The My Lai Courts-Martial 1970" online] </ref>
Peace accords were finally signed on 27 January 1973, in Paris. U.S combat troops immediately began withdrawal, and [[prisoner of war|prisoners of war]] were repatriated. U.S. supplies and limited advise could continue. In theory, North Vietnam would not reinforce its troops in the south. In practice, the North did not remove its large forces from the south, and eventually committed additional large forces in a conventional invasion.


Other factors contributed to reduced U.S. discipline and efficiency. Recreational drugs were readily available; this may not have been critical in rear areas, but a combat patrol cannot afford any reduction of its situational awareness. General social changes, including racial tension, also challenged authority. The practice of "fragging" involved U.S. soldiers killing their own leaders with a fragmentation grenade or other weapon. Fragging sometimes was a response to a crackdown on rebellion, but, in some cases, it was a way to remove a thoroughly incompetent leader that could get his men killed.
==Fall of South Vietnam==
While Ford, Nixon's final vice-president, succeeded Nixon, most major policies had been set by the time he took office. He was under a firm Congressional and public mandate to withdraw.


=== Tet Offensive, 1968===
The North, badly damaged by the bombings of 1972, recovered quickly and remained committed to the destruction of its rival. There was little U.S. popular support for new combat involvement, and no Congressional authorizations to expend funds to do so. North Vietnam launched a new conventional invasion in 1975 and seized Saigon on April 30.<ref>Military History Institute of Vietnam, ''Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People's Army of Vietnam, 1954-1975'' (2002), Hanoi's official history[http://www.amazon.com/Victory-Vietnam-Official-History-Peoples/dp/0700611754/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215223166&sr=1-1 excerpt and text search]</ref>  
The climactic moment of the war came in February 1968 during the truce usually observed during the "Tet" holiday season. Hanoi used its NLF and Viet Cong forces to destroy the government of South Vietnam an incite a popular uprising. It was decisively defeated. After Tet the insurgency was in desperate shape, defeated on the battlefields and pushed out of most of the villages it once controlled. Meanwhile in the north the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign had destroyed much of the infrastructure and ruined practically the entire economy above the level of the rice paddiesHowever, the Tet Offensive had a devastating impact on Johnson's political position in the U.S., and in that sense was a strategic victory for the Communists.<ref> Don Oberdorfer, ''Tet!: The Turning Point in the Vietnam War'' (2001) [http://www.amazon.com/Tet-Turning-Point-Vietnam-War/dp/0801867037/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215302133&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search];  James H. Willbanks, ''The Tet Offensive: A Concise History'' (2006) [http://www.amazon.com/Tet-Offensive-Concise-History/dp/0231128401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215302299&sr=1-1 excerpt and text search] </ref> 
[[Image:Viet-Tet-map.jpg|thumb|400px]]
The "tail" of the PAVN had grown as its teeth receded, for the bombing had made resupply extraordinarily difficult. The solution was the "Tet offensive," an all-out effort, aimed especially at a new target, the GVN bureaus and ARVN complexes in the cities. The Politburo theorized that the GVN was a hollow shell held together only by American firepower. They truly believed the proletariat in the cities would rise up and throw off the puppets once the tocsin was sounded; indeed, the very legitimacy of their enterprise hinged on the premise that the people of South Vietnam hated their government and really wanted Communist control. As a preliminary diversion, PAVN sent two of its divisions to surround an isolated Marine outpost at Khe Sanh, near the border. Johnson personally took control of the defense. When the media back home warned darkly of another disaster like Dien Bien Phu, LBJ made his generals swear they would never surrender Khe Sanh. They committed 5% of their ground strength to the outpost (about 6,000 men) and held another 15-20% in reserve just in case. The enemy was blasted with 22,000 airstrikes and massive artillery bombardments. When the siege was lifted, the Marines had lost 205 killed, the PAVN probably 10,000.<ref> John Prados and Ray W. Stubbe, ''Valley of Decision: The Siege of Khe Sanh'' (2004)  </ref>  


Hoping that Khe Sanh had tied down Westmoreland, the PAVN and Viet Cong struck on January 31, throwing 100,000 regular and militia troops against 36 of 44 provincial capitals and 5 of 6 major cities. They avoided American strongholds and targeted GVN government offices and ARVN installations. The ARVN recoiled in shock, then fought bravely and fiercely. American television viewers watched in utter disbelief as MPs fought to recapture the courtyard of the embassy in Saigon, which had been seized by 15 Viet Cong sappers. The harshest fighting came in the old imperial capital of Hue. The city fell to the PAVN, which immediately set out to identify and execute thousands of government supporters among the civilian population. The allies fought back fiercely, with all the firepower at their command (including the big guns of naval ships in the harbor). House to house fighting recaptured Hue on February 24. Five thousand enemy bodies were recovered (the US lost 216 dead, and ARVN 384). Nationwide, the enemy lost tens of thousands killed, and many more who were wounded or totally demoralized. US lost 1,100 dead, ARVN 2,300. The people of South Vietnam did not rise up; the NLF tocsin fell on deaf ears. However, the pacification program temporarily collapsed in half the country, and a half million more people became refugees. Despite the enormous damage done to the GVN at all levels, the NLF was in even worse shape, and it never recovered.  
No American combat units were present until the final days, when [[Operation FREQUENT WIND]] was launched to evacuate Americans and 5600 senior Vietnamese government and military officials, and employees of the U.S. The 9th Marine Amphibious Brigade, under the tactical command of [[Alfred M. Gray, Jr.]], would enter Saigon to evacuate the last Americans from the American Embassy to ships of the Seventh Fleet. Ambassador [[Graham Martin]] was among the last civilians to leave. <ref name=III-MAF>{{citation
| contribution = The Marine War: III MAF in Vietnam, 1965-1971
| first = Jack | last = Shulimson
| title = 1996 Vietnam Symposium: "After the Cold War: Reassessing Vietnam" 18-20 April 1996
| publisher = Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech University
| url = http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/vietnamcenter/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/marwar.htm}}</ref> In parallel, [[Operation Eagle Pull]] evacuated U.S. and friendly personnel from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on April 12, 1975, under the protection of the 31st Marine Amphibious Unit, part of III MAF.


ABout 40,000 Communist soldiers in the South--probably about half--were killed in 1968; many others deserted to the GVN. By sending its main force into the cities during Tet, the NLF left a vacuum in the countryside that GVN and US pacification agents could fill.  
Vietnam was unified under Communist rule.  Lê Duẩn's government purged South Vietnamese who had fought against the North, imprisoning over one million people and setting off a mass exodus and humanitarian disaster.<ref>Desbarats, Jacqueline. "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation", from ''The Vietnam Debate'' (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."</ref><ref>Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, [http://dartcenter.org/content/camp-z30-d-survivors Camp Z30-D: The Survivors], ''Orange County Register'', 29 April 2001.</ref><ref>''Associated Press'', June 23, 1979, ''San Diego Union'', July 20, 1986 reported that 200,000 to 400,000 "boat people" died at sea.</ref><ref name="Rummel">Rummel, Rudolph, [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Statistics of Vietnamese Democide], in his ''Statistics of Democide'', 1997.</ref><ref>Nghia M. Vo, ''The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam'' (McFarland, 2004).</ref> Large numbers of South Vietnamese became refugees, many as desperate "boat people."


By the end of 1968 the Saigon had pulled itself together and restored GVN authority in every province.  By 1969 Saigon forces were able to sustain the pressure on the NLF and Viet Cong and dramatically expand their control over both population and territory.<ref> See [http://books.google.com/books?id=KclCL2yZVRAC&pg=RA1-PA1128&dq=1969+year+after+tet&lr=&sig=ACfU3U2g9FZHWI96arMwJo0ivGraQadbxQ  Elliott, ''The Vietnamese War:'' (2002) p. 1128]</ref>  Indeed, for the first time GVN found itself in control of more than 90% of the population. The Tet objectives were beyond our strength, concluded General Tran Van Tra, the commander of Vietcong forces in the South:
Under the leadership of [[Pol Pot]], the Khmer Rouge murdered over 2 million Cambodians in [[the killing fields]], out of a population of around 8 million.<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref><ref name="Bruce Sharp">{{cite web
:We suffered large sacrifices and losses with regard to manpower and materiel, especially cadres at the various echelons, which clearly weakened us. Afterwards, we were not only unable to retain the gains we had made but had to overcome a myriad of difficulties in 1969 and 1970.<ref>Quoted in  Robert D. Schulzinger, ''Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975'' (1997) [http://books.google.com/books?id=8vNseCJ3D0sC&pg=PA261&lpg=PA261&dq=our+losses+were+large,+in+material+and+manpower&source=web&ots=JpCT1WiKV4&sig=FUz4duVkVKaG9pM--AIrvvfslzQ&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result p. 261 online]; for more see [http://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/TranVanTrasCommentsOnTet68.html Tran Van Tra, ''Vietnam: History of the Bulwark B2 Theatre, Vol. 5: Concluding the 30-Years War'' (1982), pp. 35-36.] </ref>
| last = Sharp
| first = Bruce
| title = Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia
|date= 1 April 2005
| url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm
| accessdate =6 March 2013 }}</ref>  The Pathet Lao slaughtered tens of thousands of Hmong tribesmen.<ref>Jane Hamilton-Merritt, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'', 1942–1992 (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp337-460.</ref><ref>''Forced Back and Forgotten'' (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989), p8.</ref>


==Nixon and Vietnamization==
Southeast Asia did not become a monolithic Communist bloc. It took over a decade for the U.S. military to recover from some of its internal turmoil and breakdown in discipline.
The "falling domino" threat was greatest in Laos, where a low-intensity civil war gave the Communist Pathet Lao control of much of that remote land. Hanoi made systematic use of Laotian and Cambodian jungle trails as supply routes to the Viet Cong--the "[[Ho Chi Minh Trail]]." Cambodia's leader Prince [[Norodom Sihanouk]] repeatedly denied the existence of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and denounced pursuit of Viet Cong across his border. In fact, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese created an elaborate infrastructure in his supposedly neutral country.  
[[Image:Viet-b52.jpg|thumb|250px|B-52 bombing in Vietnam]]
===Vietnamization===
Worldwide opposition to the war built up inexorably after 1968. The media emphasized the lack of progress; hawks were frustrated by Nixon's abandonment of victory as a goal. Democrats who kept their peace while Johnson, a fellow Democrat, was in the White House now tried to weaken a Republican president. Nixon and his chief adviser [[Henry Kissinger]] were basically "realists" in world affairs, interested in the broader constellation of forces, and the biggest powers. He had little or no compassion for the suffering of the people of Vietnam--neither the kind of sympathy the doves felt for the peasant, nor the kind the hawks felt for the victims of Communism. [[Melvin Laird]], Nixon's Secretary of Defense, was a career politician keenly aware that Americans had sourced on the war. His solution was to make troop withdrawal announcements a measure of the administration's progress. Laird worried that further involvement would postpone modernization of the military and hasten the deterioration of morale. Nixon's challenge was to maintain the national honor, keep SVN alive, and withdraw American troops. His "secret" plan to end the war was to make it irrelevant by moving the basic American strategy from containment to detente.<ref> Nixon never called his plan a "secret"; that term was invented by his opponents. </ref>  Instead of perpetual cold war, Nixon and Kissinger believed the time had come to narrow  foreign policy to a realistic and limited view of the nation's own interests. Idealism in the sense of promoting democracy and capitalism world-wide was passe, and there was little or no role for empathy for the victims of Communism. Just to be safe, NATO would continue, and a minimum strategic nuclear deterrence would be maintained. However, the US would seek detente, even friendship, with both the Soviet Union and China, would try to stop the arms race, and would tell countries threatened by subversion to defend themselves. Nixon rejected "a purely military victory on the battlefield," and also an immediate pullout that would cost the nation its honor. Like Johnson he rejected the "rollback" strategy favored by most hawks (and favored by his most important GOP rival, California governor [[Ronald Reagan]]).
===Attacks on sanctuaries in Cambodia===
In 1969, Nixon ordered B-52 strikes against PAVN supply routes in Cambodia. While the U.S. bombing of Cambodia is sometimes called "secret", it might be observed that each B-52 normally dropped 42,000 pounds of bombs, typically flying in groups of 3 or 6.  Surviving personnel in the target area were apt to know they had been bombed, and, since the U.S. had the only aircraft capable of that volume, would know the U.S. had done it. The "secrecy" may have been meant to be face-saving for Sihanouk, but there is substantial reason to believe that the secrecy, in U.S. military channels, was to keep knowledge of the bombing from the U.S. Congress and public. Actually, a reasonable case could be made that the bombing fell under the "hot pursuit" doctrine of international law, where if a neutral (Sihanouk) could not stop one country from attacking another from the neutral sanctuary, the attacked country(ies) had every right to counterattack.


When he ordered a joint US-Vietnamese ground invasion of Cambodia in 1970, many of these events first became known in the U.S., and there were intense protests, including deaths in a confrontation between rock-throwing protesters and poorly-trained National Guardsmen at Kent State University.
Nixon's larger strategy was to convince Moscow and Bejing they could curry American favor by reducing or ending their military support of Hanoi. He assumed that would drastically reduce Hanoi's threat. Second, "Vietnamization" would replace attrition. Let the Vietnamese fight and die for their own freedom. Vietnamization meant heavily arming the ARVN and turning all military operations over to it; all American troops would go home. By giving SVN with the capability of holding its own, Nixon believed, America could depart with honor. To the amazement of the world Nixon's plan seemed to work. The "era of confrontation" had passed, he announced, replaced by an "era of negotiation." Soon the Soviet Union and China were competing for American favor; Brezhnev and Nixon became buddies. In history's most astonishing about-face since Hitler and Stalin came to an agreement in 1939, Nixon went to Beijing and was toasted by Mao Zedong, as China remained fearful of Soviet attack, and saw the need for American help to modernize its faltering economy.
The Vietnamization policy achieved limited rollback of Communist gains inside South Vietnam only, and was primarily aimed at providing the arms, training and funding for the South to fight and win its own war, if it had the courage and commitment to do so.  By 1971 the Communists lost control of most, but not all, of the areas they had controlled in the South in 1967. The Communists still controlled many remote jungle and mountain districts, especially areas that protected the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Saigon's effort to strike against one of these strongholds, Lam Son, was a humiliating failure in 1971. The SVN forces proved inadequate at offensive warfare against regular DVN units. However, the North's invasion in 1975 and conquest of the South did not depend on their control of remote areas.<ref> Davidson, Vietnam at War, 637-72</ref> 
The two dissenters to Nixon's plan were Saigon and Hanoi. President Thieu kept stalling and asking for guarantees, nervous that his fragile nation would not survive American withdrawal. Hanoi remained totally dedicated to the conquest of the South, with or without its Soviet and Chinese allies. It did start negotiations believing the sooner the Americans left the better. With the Viet Cong decimated, Hanoi sent in its own PAVN troops, and had to supply them over the Ho Chi Minh Trail despite systematic bombing raids by the B-52s. American pressure forced Hanoi to reduce its level of activity in the South. In 1970 there were only 2 battles of any size.  Nixon started withdrawing American troops in 1969, and by 1970 the remaining soldiers did very little fighting.  In 1970 Cambodia erupted into a battle ground, with the Communists making a direct bid to seize that nation. Nixon in April 1970 authorized a large scale (but temporary) US-ARVN incursion into Cambodia to directly hit the PAVN headquarters and supply dumps. The forewarned PAVN had evacuated most of their soldiers, but they lost a third of its arms stockpile, as well as a critical supply line from the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. The incursion prevented the takeover by Pol Pot and his "Khymer Rouge" (Cambodian Communists). Pot broke with his original North Vietnamese sponsors, and aligned with China. 
The incursion into Cambodia in 1970 made the southern parts of SVN somewhat safer, but antiwar groups felt it proved Nixon's Vietnamization policy was all a deceit. At Kent State University a confrontation with the National Guard left seven protesters dead, and touched off a firestorm that shut down dozens of elite colleges and universities. Nixon ignored the protests and continued to Vietnamize the war. In 1971 all remaining American combat ground troops left, though air attacks continued.
===1971-72 ===
During the quiet year 1971, Hanoi was building up forces for a full scale invasion of the South.  In late March 1972, the PAVN launched a major cross-border conventional surprise attack on the South. They expected the peasants to rise up and overthrow the government; they did not. They expected the South's army to collapse; instead the ARVN fought very well indeed. They did not expect heavy US bombing, which disrupted their plans and forced a retreat.
In 1971 Nixon sent massive quantities of hardware to the ARVN, and gave Thieu a personal pledge to send air power if Hanoi invaded. The NLF and Viet Cong had largely disappeared. They controlled a few remote villages, and contested a few more, but the Pentagon estimated that 93% of the South's population now lived under secure GVN control. The guerrilla war had been decisively won by GVN. The year 1971 was eerily quiet, with no large campaigns, apart from a brief ARVN foray into Laos to which was routed by the PAVN.
Giap decided that since the Americans were gone he could invade in conventional fashion and whip the cowardly ARVN. His assumption that Vietnamization had failed was soon proven wrong. Saigon had started to exert itself; new draft laws produced over one million well-armed regular soldiers, and another four million in part-time, lightly armed self-defense militia. In March, 1972 Hanoi invaded at three points from north and west with 120,000 PAVN regulars spearheaded by tanks. This was conventional old- fashioned warfare, reminiscent of North Korea's invasion in 1950. The outcome was quite different however. Nixon ordered LINEBACKER I, with 42,000 bombing sorties over North Vietnam. Hanoi was evacuated. Nixon also ordered the mining of North Vietnam's harbors, a stroke LBJ had always vetoed for fear of Soviet or Chinese involvement, But thanks to detente the Societs and Chinese held quiet. The ARVN, its morale stiffened by American resolve, rose to the occasion. With massive tactical air support from the US, it held the line. As in Tet, the peasants refused to rise up against the GVN. "By God, the South Vietnamese can hack it!" exclaimed a pleasantly surprised General Abrams.
Since the PAVN's conventional forces required continuous resupply in large quantities, the air campaign broke the back of the invasion and the PAVN forces retreated north. However they did did retain control of a slice of territory south of the DMZ. There the NLF, renamed the "Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam" (PRG) was established; it welcomed diplomats from the Communist world, including [[Fidel Castro]], and served as one of the launch points of the 1975 invasion.<ref>Lewis Sorley, "Courage and Blood: South Vietnam's Repulse of the 1972 Easter Invasion," [http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/99summer/sorley.htm  ''Parameters'', Summer 1999, pp. 38-56]; . Dale Andradé, ''Trial by Fire: The 1972 Easter Offensive, America's Last Vietnam Battle'' (1995) 600pp. For firsthand accounts by a ARVN general see Lam Quang Thi, ''The Twenty-Five Year Century: A South Vietnamese General Remembers the Indochina War to the Fall of Saigon'' (2002), [http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Five-Year-Century-Vietnamese-Remembers/dp/1574411438/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product online edition].</ref> 
After the failed Easter Offensive the Thieu government made a fatal strategic mistake. Overconfident of its military prowess, it adopted a policy of static defense that made its units vulnerable; worse, it failed to use the breathing space to reorganize and rebuilt its faulty command structure. The departure of American forces and American money lowered morale in both military and civilian South Vietnam. Desertions rose as military performance indicators sank, and no longer was the US looking over the shoulder demanding improvement. Politics, not military need, still ruled the South Vietnamese Army. On other side, the PAVN had been badly mauled--the difference was that it knew it and it was determined to rebuild. Discarding guerrilla tactics, Giap three years to rebuild his forces into a strong conventional army. Without constant American bombing it was possible to solve the logistics problem by modernizing the Ho Chi Minh trail with 12,000 more miles or raods. Brazenly, he even constructed a pipeline along the Trail to bring in gasoline for the next invasion.<ref>Bruce Palmer, ''25 Year War'' 122;  Clodfelter 173; Davidson ch 24 and p. 738-59.</ref>
===LINEBACKER II 1972===
Late in 1972 election peace negotiations bogged down; Thieu demanded concrete evidence of Nixon's promises to Saignon. Nixon thereupon unleashed the full fury of air power to force Hanoi to come to terms. Operation LINEBACKER II, in 12 days smashed many targets in North Vietnam cities that had always been sacrosanct. 59 key targets were attacked, often using new weapons. Area targets such as railroad yards, warehouses, airfields and radar installations were attacked with Rockeye and other [[cluster munition]]s, while point targets, such as  electric power plants, and, above all, bridges  were blasted with laser-guided [[guided bomb|GBU-10 "smart bombs,"]] delivered by [[F-4 Phantom II]] [[fighter aircraft|multirole fighter]]s. US policy was to try to avoid residential areas; the Politburo had already evacuated civilians not engaged in essential war work.
The Soviets had sold Hanoi 1,200 [[SA-2 GUIDELINE]] [[surface-to-air missile]]s (SAM) that proved effective against the B-52s for the first three days. In a remarkable display of flexibility, the Air Force radically changed its bomber tactics overnight--and Hanoi ran out of SAMs. An American negotiator in Paris observed that, "Prior to LINEBACKER II, the North Vietnamese were intransigent... After LINEBACKER II, they were shaken, demoralized, and anxious to talk about anything." Beijing and Moscow advised Hanoi to agree to the peace accords;they did so on January, 23, 1973. The Air Force interpreted the quick settlement as proof unrestricted bombing of the sort they had wanted to do for eight years had finally broken Hanoi's will to fight; other analysts said Hanoi had not changed at all.<ref> Karl J. Eschmann, ''Linebacker: The Untold Story of the Air Raids over North Vietnam'' (1989); Henry Kissinger, ''White House Years'' 1:1454; Clodfelter, ''Limits of Air Power" ch 6 </ref>
==Peace accords and invasion, 1973-75==
Peace accords were finally signed on 27 January 1973, in Paris. There would be an immediate in-place permanent cease-fire. The U.S. agreed to withdraw all its troops in 60 days (but could continue to send military supplies); North Vietnam was allowed to keep its 200,000 troops in the South but was not allowed to send new ones. Prisoners were exchanged.  South Vietnam and the PRG was to start negotiations on free elections. Although  a low-intensity war continued, the world rejoiced.  In February 591 surviving POWs (mostly pilots) came home to a joyous welcome.<ref>For many years there were dark rumors and suspicions that some American POWs were left behind. Nixon accepted Hanoi's assurances there were no more POWs; no missing POW has ever been located or identified by name.</ref> All American military now departed Vietnam, including advisors to ARVN. The war seemed to be over--with vague guarantees by Hanoi not to attack the South, and Nixon's personal assurance that if peace held the US would eventually give Hanoi billions of dollars for rebuilding. Hanoi kept large forces in the unpopulated SVN's Central Highlands. The NLF and Viet Cong were ciphers by this time, and nearly all the population in the South was under GVN control. With Nixon wounded by Watergate, Congress forbad American military activity anywhere in Indochina. 
After Nixon resigned in 1974, the US was legally unable and psychologically unwilling to fight in Indochina. The 1973 Peace Agreement, instead of ending a war made continuation inevitable, for it allowed North Vietnam to keep troops in the South. The North, badly damaged by the bombings of 1972, recovered quickly and remained committed to the destruction of its rival. The main reason for the fall of South Vietnam in 1973 was the continued failure of the Saigon government to run an effective administration. Its weaknesses were compounded by exaggerated confidence that the U.S. would return if and when needed.<ref>William P. Bundy, ''A Tangled Web: Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency'' (1998) pp 497-500 </ref>Although it had plenty of weapons available--its 2100 modern aircraft comprised the fourth largest air force in the world--the ARVN had never mastered high tech and lost confidence in its capabilities when US advisers departed. Saigon felt betrayed.
===Invasion and the fall of the south, 1975===
[[Image:Viet-1975map.jpg|thumb|375px|left|North invades South, 1975, using bases in Cambodia and Laos, and across DMZ]]
After probing action showed surprising weakness in ARVN forces, Hanoi decided to make a major attack they expected would succeed in a year or so.  It took four weeks. Starting in March, 1975, Hanoi sent 18 divisions, with 300,000 of its 700,000, soldiers to invade the South again, in conventional fashion with marching armies spearheaded by 600 Russian-built tanks and 400 pieces of artillery. Instead of crawling along jungle trails they used 12,000 miles of roads they had built (and even a pipeline) since the truce. The U.S had provided South Vietnam with $4.9 billion in military supplies since the truce, giving it a powerful army and the world's fourth strongest air force.<ref>The air force performed poorly, and often abandoned its bases. The PAVN had very good anti-aircraft weapons. Ray L. Bowers, "Air Power in Southeast Asia" in Alfred F. Hurley and Ehrhart, eds. ''Air Power & Warfare: The Proceedings of the 8th Military History Symposium: United States Air Force Academy: 18-20 October 1978'' (1978) pp 309-29 esp p. 323-4 [http://books.google.com/books?id=4ymGjOGdeQUC&dq=air+force+vietnam+%22air+university%22&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0 full text online];  William W. Momyer, ''The Vietnamese Air Force, 1951 - 1975: An Analysis of Its Role in Combat,'' (2002) </ref>  The ARVN, with 1.1 million soldiers,  still had a 2-1 advantage in combat soldiers and 3-1 in artillery, but it misused its resources badly. Some ARVN units fought well; most collapsed under the 16-division onslaught. The North Vietnamese regular army, the PAVN, began a full-scale offensive by seizing Phuoc Long Province in January, 1975. In March, 1975, they continued their offensive campaigns by conducting diversionary attacks in the north threatening Pleiku and then attacking the lightly defended South Vietnamese rear area. The PAVN quickly captured the Central Highlands and then raced to the sea to divide the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN).  The PAVN  blocked the South Vietnamese attempt to retrograde from the Central Highlands and destroyed the ARVN II corps.  Of the 314 M-41 and M-48 ARVN tanks assigned to the Highlands, only three made it through to the coast.<ref> William J. Duiker, ''The Communist Road to Power,'' (2nd ed. 1996) 335, 338-42</ref>
ARVN resistance was sometimes heroic, but it kept losing battles and territories. In three weeks lost half its main force units, and more than half its aircraft.  Hundreds of thousands of refugees clogged the roads making retreat nearly impossible. Many ARVN units disintegrated as soldiers deserted to care for their families. City after city, province after province, fell into Communist hands, not so much conquered as abandoned by the dispirited and disorganized ARVN.<ref>President Thieu released  written assurances dated April 1973 from President Nixon that the U.S. would "react vigorously" if North Vietnam violated the truce agreement. But Nixon had resigned in August 1974 and his personal assurances were meaningless; After Nixon made the promises, Congress had prohibited the use of American forces in any combat role in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam without prior congressional approval. This was well known to the Saigon government. see ["Seeking the Last Exit from Viet Nam" [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,917315-4,00.html ''Time Magazine'' April 21, 1975]. President [[Gerald R. Ford]] tried to get new money for the South, but refused to consider any military action whatever.</ref>  About 140,000 refugees managed to flee the country, chiefly by boat. The PAVN then concentrated its combat power to attack the six ARVN divisions isolated in the north. After destroying these divisions, the PAVN launched its "Ho Chi Minh Campaign" that with little fighting seized Saigon on April 30, ending the war.<ref> Duiker, ''The Communist Road to Power,'' 341-49; David Butler, ''Fall of Saigon,'' (1986); Military History Institute of Vietnam, ''Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People's Army of Vietnam, 1954-1975'' (2002), Hanoi's official history[http://www.amazon.com/Victory-Vietnam-Official-History-Peoples/dp/0700611754/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215223166&sr=1-1 excerpt and text search]</ref>
No American military units had been involved until the final days, when an emergency rescue operation was launched to evacuate Americans and 5600 senior Vietnamese government and military officials, and employees of the U.S.  Vietnam was unified under Communist rule, as nearly a million refugees escaped by boat. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.  Tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers who committed themselves to the anticommunist cause were rounded up by the new rulers and sent to "reeducation" camps.
==Regional effects after 1975==
After Congress cut off aid to Cambodia, the Khymer Rouge came to power in 1975. What followed was one of the most horrific massacres of the century, as Pol Pot systematically executed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, including anyone with a trace of western contacts. The two Communist neighbors went to war in 1978-79, when Vietnam invaded and conquered Cambodia and forced the Khymer Rouge back into the jungles.
==Aftermath and memory==
===Casualties===
===International effects===
====Cambodia and Laos====
====Vietnam and China====
===War in film and literature===
==References==
==References==
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{{reflist|2}}
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The revered Washington, D.C. Vietnam Veterans Memorial designed by Maya Lin

The Vietnam War (1955-1975) was an international Cold War conflict that killed 3.8 million people, in which North Vietnam and its allies fought U.S. forces and eventually took over South Vietnam, forming a single Communist country, Vietnam.

Impact on American culture

A significant portion of Baby Boomers, the U.S. generation who were young during the protracted Vietnam War, grew up seeing continual bloody footage of active combat on television every night. As the war progressed, an avalanche of young people in the U.S. protested against the war, resulting in considerable domestic turmoil. The protests were in part because of the military draft that sent unwilling young men to their likely death or maiming, but also in part because young people did not see the aims of the war as worth the cost. This pitted the young across the nation against the World War II generation, who viewed encroachments by Communists during the Cold War as an important continuation of the wars fought by the U.S. since 1940. To prevent protests during the Iraq War, the U.S. military stopped allowing TV journalists to film actual combat.[1]

Because the U.S. lost the Vietnam War, by the 1980's it became unpopular even to refer to it, and the press began avoiding the topic, while surviving veterans went without adequate benefits for post-traumatic treatment and, unable to cope with life, became homeless by the thousands. This phenomenon was the main subject of Sylvester Stallone's 1982 action film First Blood, which was panned by critics as too violent even though only a single person died (due to his own stupidity). Several subsequent Stallone films about First Blood's main character, Rambo, were indeed mindlessly violent, unlike the original film, which was conceived and written by Stallone (who played Rambo) in protest for public abandonment of Vietnam veterans. This film also depicted the aftermath of U.S. military having sprayed the jungles of Vietnam with Agent Orange, a herbicide containing dioxin which resulted in many exposed soldiers and civilians later getting cancer, the horror of which had barely begun to be recognized by the public in 1982. The only prior major film about the Vietnam War was Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Apocalypse Now, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's story “Heart of Darkness” to Vietnam. Coppola's film was indeed violent, a direct and nightmarish depiction of the devastation of war, but critics praised it, and it won multiple awards, in contrast to Stallone's First Blood which had touched a nerve with its social criticism of American culture.

Strategic Summary

The war had four distinct periods characterized by the nature of the conflict and the nationality of the combatants: a period of civil war (1957-1964), the Americanization (1964-1969), the Vietnamization (1969-1973), and the end (1974-1975).

The Vietnam War originated from the unresolved antagonisms implicit in the Geneva Accords (1954) and French and U.S. Cold War ambitions, namely to "contain" the spread of communism. The Geneva Accords promised elections in 1956 to determine a national government for a united Vietnam. Neither the United States government nor Ngo Dinh Diem's State of Vietnam signed anything at the 1954 Geneva Conference. With respect to the question of reunification, the non-communist Vietnamese delegation objected strenuously to any division of Vietnam, but lost out when the French accepted the proposal of Viet Minh delegate Pham Van Dong,[2] who proposed that Vietnam eventually be united by elections under the supervision of "local commissions".[3] The United States countered with what became known as the "American Plan," with the support of South Vietnam and the United Kingdom.[4] It provided for unification elections under the supervision of the United Nations, but was rejected by the Soviet delegation and North Vietnamese.[5]

Due to the stalemate, North Vietnam created two organizations. The National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) was a political organization to establish civil government for the South Vietnamese regions controlled by its military arm, the Viet Cong (VC). The political/military actions of the NLF and VC against the Diem regime in South Vietnam, and Diem's escalation against the NLF/VC, essentially started a civil war. The climatic event of the civil war period was the Buddhist crisis in 1963 ending in the assassination of Ngo by a CIA-backed operation authorized by President Kennedy.

Americanization of the war began by the Johnson Administration in 1964 following the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The U.S. began sending ground combat troops in 1965, and troop strength continued to escalate through 1968. The climatic event during the Americanization period was the Tet Offensive. Following a change in presidential administrations in the 1968 election, President Nixon followed a strategy of de-escalation and "Vietnamization" of the conflict, while also escalating the conflict through incursions into Cambodia and Laos, and bombings of North Vietnam. At various times, the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces were joined by South Korean, Filipino, New Zealand, Thai and Australian troops.

As Vietnamization went into effect, and the Paris Peace Talks completed in 1972, the U.S. role changed again South Vietnam fought its own ground war, with U.S. ground combat troops withdrawing between 1968 and 1972, with the last air attacks in 1972. After that, the U.S. provided limited replacements of supplies, and maintained a large, diplomatic Defense Attache Office that monitored the RVN until the fall of South Vietnam in 1975.

After the U.S. withdrawal, South Vietnam collapsed after being invaded by the DRV in 1975. Memorable pictures of desperate people clinging to helicopters reflect the evacuation of diplomatic, military, and intelligence personnel, and some Vietnamese allies. Other than for the immediate security of the evacuation, no U.S. combat troops or aircraft had been in South Vietnam since 60 days after the signing of the peace treaty in Paris.

The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities. The most detailed demographic study calculated 791,000 to 1,141,000 war-related deaths for all of Vietnam,[6] while the Vietnamese government claimed that over 3 million Vietnamese died during the conflict.[7][8] 195,000-430,000 South Vietnamese civilians died in the war.[9][10] 50,000-65,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.[11][9] The Army of the Republic of Vietnam lost between 171,331 and 220,357 men during the war.[12][9] The official US Department of Defense figure was 950,765 communist forces killed in Vietnam from 1965 to 1974. Defense Department officials believed that these body count figures need to be deflated by 30 percent. In addition, Guenter Lewy assumes that one-third of the reported "enemy" killed may have been civilians, concluding that the actual number of deaths of communist military forces was probably closer to 444,000.[9] Some 200,000–300,000 Cambodians,[13][14][15] 20,000–200,000 Laotians,[16][17][18][19][20][21] and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict.

U.S. replaces France

Vietnam as the lightly shaded area.

After the Geneva accords of 1954 split the former French Indochina into the Republic of Vietnam (South) and Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North), France no longer had colonial authority. After certain procedural matters were resolved in early 1955, the United States took up a major role in training and funding what was now the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in the South. U.S. intelligence collection personnel had been in the area since the latter part of the Second World War. In 1954, Edward Lansdale, a United States Air Force officer seconded to the Central Intelligence Agency, came to Saigon under the cover of Assistant Air Attache leading the Saigon Military Mission, which was a CIA operation whose immediate activities included sending Vietnamese personnel north, to set up stay-behind intelligence collection and covert action teams for future use.

It has been argued, certainly with some justification, that the U.S. unwisely supported the French before 1954, and still had a pro-French view after 1954. Part of this was due to U.S. diplomatic strategy that saw French cooperation in Europe as essential to NATO and to Western stability, and taking a pro-French position in the former Indochina obtained cooperation from France. The Vietnamese were not seen as important, in Cold War terms, in the 1940s and 1950s, even though, perhaps ironically, it was Japanese expansion into French Indochina that triggered U.S. economic warfare against Japan, and eventually the Japanese decision for war in 1941.

Later, the U.S. would support anticommunist Vietnamese, never neutralists.

The strategic balance

While Vietnamese Communists had long had aims to control the whole of Vietnam, the specific decision to conquer the South was made, by the Northern leadership, in May 1959.[22] The Communist side had clearly defined political objectives, and a grand strategy to achieve them; there was a clear relationship between long-term goals and short-term actions, within their strategic theory of dau tranh. Some of their actions may seem to be from Maoist and other models, but they have some unique concepts that are not always obvious.

Apart from its internal problems, South Vietnam faced difficult military challenges. On the one hand, there was a threat of a conventional, cross-border strike from the North, reminiscent of the Korean War. In the 1950s, the U.S. advisors focused on building a "mirror image" of the U.S. Army, designed to meet and defeat a conventional invasion. [23] Ironically, while the lack of counterguerrilla forces threatened the South for many years, the last two blows were Korea-style invasions. With U.S. air support, the South were able to largely repel a conventional invasion by North Vietnam. The 1975 invasion which defeated the South was not opposed by U.S. forces.

Early U.S. noncombat advisory and support roles

Harry S. Truman, as soon as the Second World War ended, was under great pressure to return the country to normal civilian conditions, and he demobilised rapidly to release funds for domestic spending. There were no such pressures to demobilize, however, on Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. Truman has been blamed for "losing" Eastern Europe and China, but it is less clear what could have been done to stop it. The decision to cut military commitment came home to roost in the Korean War, when Truman had few forces to dispatch.

From 1955, the U.S. took over the role of training and significantly funding the Southern Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN). In 1959, the first U.S. advisers to go into combat in the area were in Laos, not Vietnam. With a negotiated settlement to the Laotian civil war in 1962, U.S. attention shifted to South Vietnam. Communications intercepts in 1959, for example, confirmed the start of the Ho Chi Minh trail and other preparation for large-scale fighting. This information may not have been fully shared with the South Vietnamese, due to security concerns over the intelligence methods used to get the information.

Interactions of South Vietnamese & U.S. politics

After the French colonial authority ended, Vietnam was ruled by a nominally civilian government, led by first Bao Dai and then, from 1954, by Ngo Dinh Diem; neither were elected. Communist statements frequently spoke of it as a U.S. "puppet" government, although the Northern government had not been elected and had little more claim to democratic legitimacy. Both governments were clients of the different major sides in the Cold War.

Diem was strongly anti-communist, but authoritarian, and there were increasing protests against his rule. He was a Catholic in a Buddhist-majority country, but gave preference to Catholics. While personally ascetic, he tolerated a serious level of corruption in the government.

Effect on military efficiency

Not only under Diem, appointing officers to the command of military units, and also to posts in the separate hierarchy of district and province chiefs, often were made as political loyalty as the first criterion, possibly bribes or favors at the next, and military proficiency sometimes as a last consideration. Officers were shifted from post to post, in the interest of breaking up potential coup plots.

In practice, the most powerful military positions were the commanders of the four Corps tactical zones (CTZ), also known as military regions. Even though a CTZ was geographic, and province and district chiefs were usually military officers, the province/district reporting went through the Ministry of the Interior rather than the military Joint General Staff.

Especially powerful units might, in the interest of interfering with coups, be shifted from one chain of command for another. At the Battle of Ap Bac, for example, the potent armored personnel carriers (APC) had been shifted from the operational control of the military commander to that of the province chief. Before the unit commander would commit his resources to battle, at the urging of a U.S. adviser to the division commander, the commanding officer of the APC company had to obtain province chief as well as military approval, significantly increasing the time before this unit could intervene in battle.

Conflicting goals

Vietnamese and U.S. goals were also not always in complete agreement. Until 1969, the U.S.A. was generally anything opposed to any policy, nationalist or not, which might lead to the South Vietnamese becoming neutralist rather than anticommunist. There is evidence that the U.S. supported attempts to replace governments that were considering forming a neutralist coalition that might include the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, a communist-dominated opposition. The Cold War containment policy was in force through the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Administrations, while the Nixon administration supported a more multipolar model of detente.

While there were still power struggles and internal corruption, there was much more stability between 1967 and 1975. Still, the South Vietnamese government did not enjoy either widespread popular support, or even an enforced social model of a Communist state. It is much easier to disrupt a state without common popular or decision maker goals.

Instability

The association of the U.S. with the RVN government, however, was sufficiently strong that instability there both reflected adversely on the U.S. role, and seen as interfering with the fight against Communism. While Diem ruled between 1954 and 1963; there followed a period of frequent changes of government, some lasting only weeks, between 1964 and 1967, until moderate stability came in 1967.

Protests generally called the Buddhist crisis of 1963, which also involved other Vietnamese sects, such as the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao, were a major disruption by June. These protests were seen by the U.S. as strengthening the Communist insurgency, and, after rejecting earlier initiatives for a military coup, agreed that Diem had to go.

In November 1963, Diem was overthrown and killed in a military coup. The United States was aware of the coup preparations and, through CIA officer Lucien Conein, had given limited financial support to the generals involved. There is no evidence that the U.S. expected Diem, and his brother and closest political adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu to be killed; U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. had offered him physical protection.

The leaders of the November coup were replaced by a nominal civilian government really under military control, which was overthrown by yet another military coup (involving some of the same generals) in January 1964.

Between 1964 and 1967 there was a constant struggle for power in South Vietnam, and not just from within the military. Several Buddhist and other factions often derived from religious sects, which became involved in the jockeying for political power, such as the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao. Even the Vietnamese Buddhists were not monolithic, and had their own internal struggles. At varying times, sects, organized crime syndicates such as the Binh Xuyen, and individual provincial leaders had paramilitary groups that affected the political process; while the Montagnard ethnic groups wanted autonomy for their region. William Colby (then chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's , Far Eastern Division in the operational directorate) observed that civilian politicians "divided and sub-divided into a tangle of contesting ambitions and claims and claims to power and participation in the government." [24] Some of these factions sought political power or wealth, while others sought to avoid domination by other groups (Catholic vs Buddhist in the Diem Coup).

After a period of overt military government, there was a gradual transition to at least the appearance of democratic government, but South Vietnam neither developed a true popular government, nor rooted out the corruption that caused a lack of support.

Covert operations

Well before the Gulf of Tonkin and overt operations, there were a number of covert operations, some ostensibly with U.S. advisers to South Vietnamese crews, and some, especially in Laos, of which no public announcement was made. Certain of these operations became public in postwar historical analyses, official announcements at the time, or press reporting that eventually was confirmed.

US activity before independence

Still, there was U.S. activity in Southeast Asia, which grew out of covert operations directed more at China. In August 1950, the CIA bought the assets of Civil Air Transport (CAT), an airline founded after the Second World War by Gen. Claire L. Chennault and Whiting Willauer. While CAT continued commercial operations, it acted as a CIA "proprietary", or covert support organization under commercial cover. CAT aircraft, for example, dropped personnel and supplies over mainland China during the Korean War.[25] CAT later became part of Air America.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower succeeded Truman as President in 1952, after a campaign that had attacked Truman's "weaknesses" against communism and in Korea, he formulated a strong policy of containing Communism. There was much sensitivity over "softness" exemplified by the excesses of Senator Joe McCarthy. While the Eisenhower Administration avoided becoming too enmeshed in the French problem of the Indochinese revolution, airlift was provided by CAT pilots. United States Air Force C-119 Flying Boxcar transports, repainted with French insignia. CAT trained the crews at Clark Air Force base in the Philippines, and then flew the aircraft to Gia Lam Airport in Hanoi. They made airdrops to French forces in Laos between May and July. Eventually, CAT flew logistics missions to Dien Bien Phu, in March to May 1954; one aircraft was shot down and others damaged.

Laos

After France left the region, the Royal Lao Government (RLG) quietly asked the United States to replace the former French funding of the Lao military, and to add military technical aid from the increasingly active Communist insurgency, the Pathet Lao. This assistance started in January 1955, directed by a new part of the Embassy, with the nondescript name Program Evaluation Office (PEO). At first, the PEO simply dispensed funds, but took on a much larger role in 1959.

When the first direct military assistance began in July 1959, the PEO was operated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency using military personnel acting as civilians. [26] CIA sent a unit from United States Army Special Forces, who arrived on the CIA proprietary airline Air America, wearing civilian clothes and having no obvious US connection. These soldiers led Meo and Hmong tribesmen against Communist forces. The covert program was called Operation Hotfoot. At the US Embassy, BG John Heintges was designated the head of the PEO. [27]

In April 1961, Chief of Staff of the Air Force Curtis LeMay’s began to approve certain covert operations, such as JUNGLE JIM. He denied them to the press. They were, however, a response to President Kennedy's challenge for the military to develop a force capable of fighting the “Communist revolutionary warfare”, regarded as proxy wars for the U.S. and Soviet Union. One of the first to respond to the call for combat control volunteers[28]

CIA, MACV-SOG and OPPLAN34A

John F. Kennedy approved, on May 11, 1961, a Central Intelligence Agency plan for covert operations against North Vietnam. These included ground, air, and naval operations. Eventually, the operations were transferred to officially military control, in a unit, MACV-SOG, principally reporting to MACV but with an approval chain that often ran to the White House.

CIA naval operations, under Tucker Gougelmann, in 1961,[29] starting with motorized junks. The first motor torpedo boats were transferred to CIA in October 1962. At the end of 1962, raids began.

They received their improved Norwegian Nasty-class boats in 1963.[30] These more sophisticated craft were crewed by Norwegian and German mercenaries as well as South Vietnamese; U.S. Navy SEALs conducted the training in Danang.

MACV-SOG was formed in January 1964, and took over the "modest" CIA maritime operation, based in Danang, now given the cover name Naval Advisory Detachment, actually branch OP37 of MACV-SOG. The attacks, under the command of MACV-SOG, were actually carried out by the Coastal Security Service of the RVN Strategic Technical Directorate.

So, at least a year before the Gulf of Tonkin, there had been some raids against North Vietnam. Independent of MACV-SOG, the U.S. Navy began to conduct signals intelligence patrols for the National Security Agency, close to North Vietnam but in international waters. These were called the DESOTO patrols, and used overt U.S. Navy destroyers, with a van packed with electronics and technicians mounted on their decks.

On the night of July 30, 1964, four MACV-SOG boats shelled North Vietnamese shore installations, after a series of earlier maritime operations. The North Vietnamese went on high naval alert.

On July 31, 1964, there was a DESOTO patrol.[31] The timing after the MACV-SOG operation may have been coincidental, although there have been suggestions that the increased North Vietnamese activity was a rich environment for SIGINT collection. There is no strong indication that the DESOTO patrols were trying to provoke North Vietnamese response; they carefully stayed in international waters and were fully identifiable as U.S. ships.

U.S. buildup and overt combat involvement

This section focuses on the period when U.S. forces became involved in large-scale, direct combat. Wherever possible, the national-level decisions that went into a change of military action will be presented, but, in a number of situations, an action may have been the result of a perceived need to "do something" rather than having a direct effect on the enemy. Such decision-making style is not unique to this period. George Kennan, considered a consummate diplomat and diplomatic theorist, observed that American leaders, starting with the 1899-1900 "Open Door" policy to China, have a

neurotic self-consciousness and introversion, the tendency to make statements and take actions with regard not to their effect on the international scene but rather to their effect on those echelons of American opinion, congressional opinion first and foremost, to which the respect statesmen are anxious to appeal. The question became not: How effective is what I am doing in terms of the impact it makes on our world environment? but rather: how do I look, in the mirror of American domestic opinion, as I do it?[32]

Even when leaders' goals are sincere, the need to be seen as doing the popular thing can become counterproductive. There were many times, in the seemingly inexorable advance of decades of American involvement in Southeast Asia, where reflection might have led to caution. Instead, the need to be seen as active, as well as the clashes of strong egos, separate the needs of policy from the dictates of politics. The personalities of different Presidents and key advisers all had an effect. Many, but by no means all, of the key political decisions were under Johnson, but Presidents from Truman through Ford all had roles.

Although Americans died in supporting South Vietnamese involvement beginning in 1962, the greatest U.S. involvement was from mid-1964 through 1972. U.S ground troops began reducing in 1968 and much more sharply in 1969. So, much of the detailed U.S. political action with other countries will be in Joint warfare in South Vietnam 1964-1968, Vietnamization, and air operations against North Vietnam.

Vietnam's climate has a major effect on warfare, especially involving vehicles and aircraft. Major operations usually took place in the dry season. While the most southern parts tend to have a generally tropical climate, there are two major climactic periods:

  • Monsoon season of heat, rain, and mud, with limited mobility (May to September)
  • Warm and dry conditions (October to March)

Combat support advisory phase

John F. Kennedy and his key staff, came from a different elite than that which had spawned the Cold Warriors of the Eisenhower Administration. While the form was different, a militant anti-Communism was underneath many of the Kennedy Administration policies. [33] Its rougher operatives had a different style than Joe McCarthy, but it is sometimes forgotten that Robert Kennedy (RFK) had been on McCarthy's staff. [34]

Where Republicans during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations blamed Democrats who had "lost China", the Kennedy Administration was not out to lose anything. The first covert operations in the region began in the Eisenhower Administration, but Kennedy increased both operations in Laos and Vietnam.

Intensification

Guerrilla attacks increased in the early 1960s, at the same time as the new John F. Kennedy administration made Presidential decisions to increase its influence. Diem, as other powers were deciding their policies, was facing disorganized attacks and internal political dissent. There were conflicts between the government, dominated by minority Northern Catholics, and both the majority Buddhists and minorities such as the Montagnards, Cao Dai, and Hoa Hao. These conflicts were exploited, initially at the level of propaganda and recruiting, by stay-behind Viet Minh receiving orders from the North.

U.S. personnel went into the field with ARVN personnel starting in 1962. The term "adviser" was popular but not always accurate. While many U.S. personnel indeed did advise their counterparts, and U.S. forces did not take a direct combat role, a substantial part of field activity was devoted to tactical airlift of ARVN troops, and a wide range of technical support. The first American soldier to die in combat was not with ARVN infantry, but part of a signals intelligence team, doing direction finding on Viet Cong radio transmitters in the field, whose team was ambushed.

Th Battle of Ap Bac, fought on January 2, 1963, did involve both U.S. advisers to ARVN commanders, as well as U.S. aviation support. John Paul Vann was the senior tactical adviser, and his outrage about ARVN performance both stimulated aggressive investigative journalism, as well as infuriating the U.S. command.

Deterioration and reassessment

By November 1963, after Diem was killed, there was mixed feelings among the JCS if covert operations alone could have a significant effect. [35] Chief of Staff of the Air Force GEN Curtis LeMay pushed his JCS colleagues for "more resolute, overt military actions." He was joined by Commandant of the Marine Corps GEN David Shoup, and gained stronger support from the Army and Navy chiefs, GEN Earle Wheeler and ADM David McDonald. ADM Harry Felt, commander of United States Pacific Command, also believed covert actions alone would not be decisive. LeMay said "we in the military felt we were not in the decision-making process at all [Chairman of the JCS Maxwell] Taylor might have been but we didn't agree with Taylor in most cases."[36]

To senior civilian officials, with the Joint Chiefs receiving it via Secretary of Defense McNamara, Johnson stated his policy decision in classified National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 273, of November 26, 1963. The key point was the U.S. goal was to strengthen South Vietnam to win its own contest; the U.S. expected to begin to withdraw troops. "It remains the central object of the United States in South Vietnam to assist the people and Government of that country to win their contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy. The test of all U.S. decisions and actions in this area should be the effectiveness of their contribution to this purpose.

He made pacification of the Mekong Delta the highest priority, but also ordered planning for increased yet deniable activity against North Vietnam. "With respect to Laos, a plan should be developed and submitted for approval by higher authority for military operations up to a line up to 50 kilometers inside Laos, together with political plans for minimizing the international hazards of such an enterprise." These operations would change from CIA to MACV control. A "favorable influence", but no operations in, Cambodia was desired.

A high priority was producing "as strong and persuasive a case as possible to demonstrate to the world the degree to which the Viet Cong is controlled, sustained and supplied from Hanoi, through Laos and other channels."[37]

The JCS responded to NSAM 273 with a January 22, 1964 memorandum to McNamara. Significant differences with the Presidential decision, which emphasized assisting South Vietnam, was a JCS goal of "victory" as the goal of U.S. military operations.

Gulf of Tonkin Incident

(PD) Diagram: U.S. Naval History & Heritage Command
Track chart of USS Maddox (DD-731) and three North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats, during their action on 2 August 1964. Attacks by aircraft from USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14) are also shown.

On August 2, 1964, a DESOTO Patrol destroyer (USS Maddox, DD-731) was believed to have been approached, and possibly fired upon, by the North Vietnamese. After much declassification and study, the incident largely remains shrouded in what German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz has called the "fog of war," but questions have been raised about whether the North Vietnamese believed they were under attack, about who fired the first shots, and, indeed, if there was a true attack. There has not been a clear indication from the North Vietnamese if they thought the DESOTO and 34A operations were part of the same programs, and, if so, if destroyer-sized vessels represented an escalation. Later on the 2nd, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Maxwell Taylor, ordered that DESOTO patrols should not be made at the same time as 34A operations.

There is some question as to whether the second patrol (increased to two ships with air cover) was actually attacked, or if there were merely North Vietnamese warships in their area. Declassified NSA intercepts of North Vietnamese communications, on the 4th, show considerable confusion on the DRV side. Operating under Presidential authority, Johnson launched Operation PIERCE ARROW (air strikes against North Vietnamese naval facilities and the oil refinery at Vinh) on the evening of the 4th (Washington time), and gave a speech regarding the same approximately 90 minutes before the Navy aircraft reached their targets.[31]

President Johnson asked for, and received, Congressional authority to use military force in Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which was described as a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. warships. Congress did not "declare war," which is its responsibility under the Constitution; nevertheless, it launched what effectively was at the time the longest war in U.S. history, and even longer if the covert actions before the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin situation are included. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, although later revoked, was considered by Lyndon Johnson as his basic authority to conduct military operations in Southeast Asia. It serves as an example of how outright declarations of war have become extremely rare since the Second World War.

Beginning of air operations

(PD) Photo: United States Air Force
A U.S. Air Force Boeing B-52F-70-BW Stratofortress drops Mk 117 750 lb (340 kg) bombs over Vietnam, circa 1965-1966.

Immediately after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, there was a period of retaliation for specific attacks, Operation FLAMING DART, and then a steady but incremental pressure under Operation Rolling Thunder operations against North Vietnam. There was also extensive air support overtly inside South Vietnam, and, at different times, in Laos and Cambodia; some of these are discussed above in the section on covert activity.

From a current doctrinal standpoint, these campaigns should be evaluated according to an examination of air operations relying on a planning model at the level of operational art. This model distinguishes effectiveness, or the results of the campaign, from the tactical aspects of weapons effects. Several factors need to be considered to determine effectiveness. The campaigns in Laos and Cambodia were far more effective than Operation Rolling Thunder, as they were not executed as a subtle means of "signaling", but had clear objectives measurable in military terms. The objectives here, as well as in Operation Linebacker I, were military. Operation Linebacker II also was effective, but it had well-defined objectives at the level of grand strategy: compellence to return to negotiations. [38]

  1. What conditions are required to achieve the objectives?
  2. What sequence of actions is most likely to create those conditions?
  3. What resources are required to accomplish that sequence of actions?
  4. What is the likely cost or risk in performing that sequence of actions?

Major ground combat phase

See also: Vietnam War military technology

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had been appointed by Kennedy, became Johnson's principal adviser, and continued to push an economic and signaling grand strategy. Johnson and McNamara, although it would be hard to find two men of more different personality, formed a quick bond. McNamara appeared more impressed by economics and Schelling's compellence theory [39] than by Johnson's liberalism or Senate-style deal-making, but they agreed in broad policy. [40]

They directed a plan for South Vietnam that they believed would end the war quickly. Note that the initiative was coming from Washington; the unstable South Vietnamese government was not part of defining their national destiny. The plan selected was from GEN William Westmoreland, the field commander in Vietnam.

This model regarded the enemy forces in the field as the opposing center of gravity, as opposed to the local security and development of pacification. The enemy, however, had a different idea of centers of gravity; see Vietnamese Communist grand strategy.

Over time, the U.S. developed tactics increasingly appropriate to the environment and foe, given the Westmoreland's assumption that the center of gravity was the enemy main force. Some of the early operations included:

There were many such operations, variously by U.S. only, U.S. and ARVN, and ARVN forces. The term "search and destroy" was often used to describe ground operations against Viet Cong and People's Army of Viet Nam troops.

The UH-1 "Huey", as well as other types of helicopters, are iconic of the Vietnam War. The full capabilities of units with integrated helicopter support were shown by the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) at the Battle of the Ia Drang and the Battle of Bong Son.

These operations continued, some joint with ARVN troops and some by U.S. and third country forces alone. Australian units, integrated into large U.S. forces, were highly regarded. Less mobile but potent divisions came from South Korea and Thailand.

Immense fire support, from ground and air platforms, supported these operations. Close air support both from fighter-bombers and early armed helicopters was common, but new techniques came into wide use. ARC LIGHT was the general code name for operations using B-52 heavy bombers against targets in South Vietnam. The term grew to encompass B-52 operations against targets in Cambodia and Laos, principally against the Ho Chi Minh trail. B-52 use in the major Operation Linebacker I and Operation Linebacker II operations against North Vietnam are generally not considered ARC LIGHT missions; see the respective operations.

There were also technical measures to clear jungle, both mechanical and chemical. See Vietnam War military technology.

Unquestionably, Westmoreland's approach inflicted immense casualties on the enemy forces. Even so, the North Vietnamese seemed willing to accept them. During the second half of 1967, the North Vietnamese intensified operations in the border regions of South Vietnam, in at least regimental strength. Unlike the usual hit-and-run tactics used by communist forces, these were sustained and bloody affairs. Beginning at Con Thien and Song Be in October 1967, then at Dak To

There had long been fighting in the Khe Sanh area, but the North Vietnamese greatly intensified their attacks in early January 1968, before the Tet Offensive. They continued operations there until April.

Tet Offensive

By 1968, and perhaps in 1967, Johnson's chief adviser on the war, McNamara, had increasingly less faith in the Johnson-Westmoreland model. McNamara quotes GEN William DuPuy, Westmoreland's chief planner, as recognizing that as long as the enemy could fight from the sanctuaries of Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam, it was impossible to bring adequate destruction on the enemy, and the model was inherently flawed.[41]

Opposition against him peaked in 1968; see Tet Offensive. On March 31, 1968, Johnson said on national television,

"I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president"

In March, Johnson had also announced a bombing halt, in the interests of starting talks. The first discussions were limited to starting broader talks, as a quid-pro-quo for a bombing halt.:[42]

Vietnamization phase

During the Presidential campaign, a random wire service story headlined that Nixon had a "secret plan for ending the war, but, in reality, Nixon was only considering alternatives at this point. He remembered how Eisenhower had deliberately leaked, to the Communist side in the Korean War, that he might be considering using nuclear weapons to break the deadlock. Nixon adapted this into what he termed the "Madman Strategy".[43]

He told H. R. Haldeman, one of his closest aides,

"I call it the madman theory, Bob.I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I've reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry, and he has his hand on the nuclear button, and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace."[44]

Nixon decisionmaking structure

After the election of Richard M. Nixon, a review of U.S. policy in Vietnam was the first item on the national security agenda. Henry Kissinger, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, asked all relevant agencies to respond with their assessment, which they did on March 14, 1969.[45]

"Controlling the policy were a small group of men, President Richard M. Nixon, and which included the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs, Henry A. Kissinger; the President’s Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs, Major General Alexander M. Haig; and a few National Security Council officials trusted by Kissinger."[46] Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker also were involved, but Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers were rarely part of the inner discussions.

Policy toward SVN

U.S. policy changed to one of turning ground combat over to South Vietnam, a process called Vietnamization, a term coined in January 1969. Nixon, in contrast, saw resolution not just in Indochina, in a wider scope. He sought Soviet support, saying that if the Soviet Union helped bring the war to an honorable conclusion, the U.S. would "do something dramatic" to improve U.S.-Soviet relations. [42] In worldwide terms, Vietnamization replaced the earlier containment policy[47] with detente.[48] Also in 1969, both overt and covert Paris Peace Talks began.

While Nixon hesitated to authorize a military request to bomb Cambodian sanctuaries, which civilian analysts considered less important than Laos, he authorized, in March, bombing of Cambodia as a signal to the North Vietnamese. While direct attack against North Vietnam, as was later done in Operation Linebacker I, might be more effective, he authorized the Operation MENU bombing of Cambodia, starting on March 17. These bombings were kept secret from the U.S. leadership and electorate; the North Vietnamese clearly knew they were being bombed. It first leaked to the press in May, and Nixon ordered warrantless surveillance of key staff. [49]

Nixon also directed Cyrus Vance to go to Moscow in March, to encourage the Soviets to put pressure on the North Vietnamese to open negotiations with the U.S. [50] The Soviets, however, either did not want to get in the middle, or had insufficient leverage on the North Vietnamese.

Final air support phase

In the transition to full "Vietnamization," U.S. and third country ground troops turned ground combat responsibility to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Air and naval combat, combat support, and combat service support from the U.S. continued. While the ARVN improved in local security and small operations, Operation Lam Son 719, in February 1971, the first large operation with only ARVN ground forces, they took casualties that the South Vietnamese leadership considered unacceptable, and withdrew. This operation still had U.S. helicopters lifting the crews, and U.S. intelligence and artillery support.

They did much better against the 1972 Eastertide invasion, but this still involved extensive U.S. air support. To stop the logistical support of the Eastertide invasion, Nixon launched Operation Linebacker I, with the operational goal of disabling the infrastructure of infiltration. One of the problems of the Republic of Vietnam's Air Force is that it never operated under central control, even for a specific maximum-effort air offensive. South Vietnamese aircraft always were controlled by regional corps commanders, so never developed skills in deep battlefield air interdiction.

When the North refused to return to negotiations in late 1972, Nixon, in mid-December, ordered bombing at an unprecedented level of intensity, Operation Linebacker II. This was at the strategic and grand strategic levels, attacking not so much the infiltration infrastructure, but North Vietnam's ability to import supplies, its internal transportation and logistics, command and control, and integrated air defense system. Within a month of the start of the operation, a peace agreement was signed.

Peace accords were finally signed on 27 January 1973, in Paris. U.S combat troops immediately began withdrawal, and prisoners of war were repatriated. U.S. supplies and limited advise could continue. In theory, North Vietnam would not reinforce its troops in the south. In practice, the North did not remove its large forces from the south, and eventually committed additional large forces in a conventional invasion.

Fall of South Vietnam

While Ford, Nixon's final vice-president, succeeded Nixon, most major policies had been set by the time he took office. He was under a firm Congressional and public mandate to withdraw.

The North, badly damaged by the bombings of 1972, recovered quickly and remained committed to the destruction of its rival. There was little U.S. popular support for new combat involvement, and no Congressional authorizations to expend funds to do so. North Vietnam launched a new conventional invasion in 1975 and seized Saigon on April 30.[51]

No American combat units were present until the final days, when Operation FREQUENT WIND was launched to evacuate Americans and 5600 senior Vietnamese government and military officials, and employees of the U.S. The 9th Marine Amphibious Brigade, under the tactical command of Alfred M. Gray, Jr., would enter Saigon to evacuate the last Americans from the American Embassy to ships of the Seventh Fleet. Ambassador Graham Martin was among the last civilians to leave. [52] In parallel, Operation Eagle Pull evacuated U.S. and friendly personnel from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on April 12, 1975, under the protection of the 31st Marine Amphibious Unit, part of III MAF.

Vietnam was unified under Communist rule. Lê Duẩn's government purged South Vietnamese who had fought against the North, imprisoning over one million people and setting off a mass exodus and humanitarian disaster.[53][54][55][56][57] Large numbers of South Vietnamese became refugees, many as desperate "boat people."

Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge murdered over 2 million Cambodians in the killing fields, out of a population of around 8 million.[13][58] The Pathet Lao slaughtered tens of thousands of Hmong tribesmen.[59][60]

Southeast Asia did not become a monolithic Communist bloc. It took over a decade for the U.S. military to recover from some of its internal turmoil and breakdown in discipline.

References

  1. It's worth mentioning that, in addition to banning TV from showing film of combat, the U.S. military also tried to reduce the number of deaths during the Iraq War with improved medical triage. The result was that, though more soldiers survived, many of them returned home with severe disablement, including especially lots of brain injuries which meant they would likely be dependent for life on care by their families.
  2. The Pentagon Papers (1971), Beacon Press, vol. 3, p. 134.
  3. The Pentagon Papers (1971), Beacon Press, vol. 3, p. 119.
  4. The Pentagon Papers (1971), Beacon Press, vol. 3, p. 140.
  5. The Pentagon Papers (1971), Beacon Press, vol. 3, p. 140.
  6. Charles Hirschman et al., "Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate," Population and Development Review, December 1995.
  7. Shenon, Philip. 20 Years After Victory, Vietnamese Communists Ponder How to Celebrate, 23 April 1995. Retrieved on 24 February 2011.
  8. Associated Press, 3 April 1995, "Vietnam Says 1.1 Million Died Fighting For North."
  9. 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 Lewy, Guenter (1978). America in Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press. Appendix 1, pp.450-453
  10. Thayer, Thomas C (1985). War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam. Boulder: Westview Press. Ch. 12.
  11. Wiesner, Louis A. (1988). Victims and Survivors Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam. New York: Greenwood Press. p.310
  12. Thayer, Thomas C (1985). War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam. Boulder: Westview Press. p.106.
  13. 13.0 13.1 Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
  14. Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L'Harmattan, 1995).
  15. Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.
  16. Warner, Roger, Shooting at the Moon, (1996), pp366, estimates 30,000 Hmong.
  17. Obermeyer, "Fifty Years of Violent War Deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia", British Medical Journal, 2008, estimates 60,000 total.
  18. T. Lomperis, From People's War to People's Rule, (1996), estimates 35,000 total.
  19. Small, Melvin & Joel David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars 1816–1980, (1982), estimates 20,000 total.
  20. Taylor, Charles Lewis, The World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators, estimates 20,000 total.
  21. Stuart-Fox, Martin, A History of Laos, estimates 200,000 by 1973.
  22. An enabling Party resolution was passed in January, but this was the date of starting to build infrastructure; combat use of that infrastructure was still two or more years away. See Vietnamese Communist grand strategy
  23. , Chapter 6, "The Advisory Build-Up, 1961-1967," Section 1, pp. 408-457, The Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition, Volume 2
  24. William Colby, Lost Victory, 1989, p. 173, quoted in McMaster, p. 165
  25. William M. Leary (Winter 1999-2000), "CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955-1974, Supporting the "Secret War"", Studies in Intelligence
  26. Haas, Michael E. (1997). Apollo’s Warriors: US Air Force Special Operations during the Cold War. Air University Press., p. 165
  27. Holman, Victor (1995). Seminole Negro Indians, Macabebes, and Civilian Irregulars: Models for the Future Employment of Indigenous Forces.
  28. Haas, pp. 212-214, 221-224
  29. Shultz, Richard H., Jr. (2000), the Secret War against Hanoi: the untold story of spies, saboteurs, and covert warriors in North Vietnam, Harper Collins Perennial, p. 18
  30. Shultz, p. 176
  31. 31.0 31.1 H. R. McMaster (1997), Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, Harpercollins, pp. 120-134 Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name "McMaster" defined multiple times with different content
  32. Kennan, George F. (1967), Memoirs 1925-1950, Little, Brown, pp. 53-54
  33. Halberstam, David (1972), The Best and the Brightest, Random House, pp. 121-122
  34. Thomas, Evan (October 2000), "Bobby: Good, Bad, And In Between - Robert F. Kennedy", Washington Monthly
  35. , Chapter 1, "U.S. Programs in South Vietnam, Nov. 1963-Apr. 1965," Section 1, pp. 1-56, The Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition, Volume 3
  36. McMaster, pp. 59-60
  37. Lyndon B. Johnson (November 26, 1963), National Security Action Memorandum 273: South Vietnam
  38. Joint Chiefs of Staff (13 February 2008), Department of Defense Joint Publication 5-0: Joint Operation Planning
  39. Carlson, Justin, "The Failure of Coercive Diplomacy: Strategy Assessment for the 21st Century", Hemispheres: Tufts Journal of International Affairs
  40. Morgan, Patrick M. (2003), Deterrence Now, Cambridge University Press
  41. Gen. William E Dupuy, August 1, 1988 interview, quoted by McNamara, pages 212 and 371.
  42. 42.0 42.1 Henry Kissinger (1973), Ending the Vietnam War: A history of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War, Simon & Schuster, p. 50 Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name "Kissinger" defined multiple times with different content
  43. Karnow, p. 582
  44. Carroll, James (June 14, 2005), "Nixon's madman strategy", Boston Globe
  45. Kissinger, p. 50
  46. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, vol. Volume VIII, Vietnam, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, January–October 1972
  47. Kissinger, pp. 27-28
  48. Kissinger, pp. 249-250
  49. Karnow, p. 591-592
  50. Kissinger, pp. 75-78
  51. Military History Institute of Vietnam, Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People's Army of Vietnam, 1954-1975 (2002), Hanoi's official historyexcerpt and text search
  52. Shulimson, Jack, The Marine War: III MAF in Vietnam, 1965-1971, 1996 Vietnam Symposium: "After the Cold War: Reassessing Vietnam" 18-20 April 1996, Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech University
  53. Desbarats, Jacqueline. "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation", from The Vietnam Debate (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."
  54. Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, Camp Z30-D: The Survivors, Orange County Register, 29 April 2001.
  55. Associated Press, June 23, 1979, San Diego Union, July 20, 1986 reported that 200,000 to 400,000 "boat people" died at sea.
  56. Rummel, Rudolph, Statistics of Vietnamese Democide, in his Statistics of Democide, 1997.
  57. Nghia M. Vo, The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam (McFarland, 2004).
  58. Sharp, Bruce (1 April 2005). Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia. Retrieved on 6 March 2013.
  59. Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942–1992 (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp337-460.
  60. Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989), p8.