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Vietnam Essay Grade 12 memo: Questions and Answers PDF Download

Vietnam Essay Grade 12 memo: Questions and Answers PDF Download:

The extension of the cold war: case study – vietnam, question 1:.

The tactics and strategies that the United States of America used between 1963 and 1975 against the Vietcong during the war in Vietnam were a dismal failure. Do you agree with the statement? Use relevant evidence to support your line of argument.

SUMMARY Candidates are expected to form an opinion on the statement, providing their agreement or disagreement. Their opinions should be based on arguments regarding whether the US lost the Vietnam War due to unconventional guerrilla warfare strategies and local environmental factors. Candidates should substantiate their viewpoints with relevant historical evidence.

KEY POINTS TO CONSIDER The following aspects should be included in the candidate’s response:

Introduction: Candidates must state their position on the statement and provide an overview of their supporting arguments.

IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS The response should delve into the strategies used by both the USA and the Vietcong:

Background: Examination of the division of North and South Vietnam, initial US intervention in South Vietnam due to the Domino Theory, and the significance of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The introduction and failure of the ‘Safe Village’ policy by the USA, aiming to separate guerrillas from villagers.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident and its impact on escalating the conflict.
Deployment of 3500 US Marines and ground troops to Vietnam on March 8, 1965.
Environmental factors: Operation Ranch Hand and the use of chemical defoliants and chemical weapons, leading to significant environmental damage and international condemnation.
Ineffectiveness of conventional strategies (Operation Rolling Thunder) versus unconventional guerrilla warfare tactics by the Vietcong.
Impact of the Tet Offensive on USA-controlled cities and increasing number of US soldiers’ casualties.
The implications of sending young and inexperienced soldiers to Vietnam, Search and Destroy Policy, and the My Lai massacre, leading to increased support for the Vietcong.
External support to North Vietnam from USSR and China, resulting in access to modern weaponry.
Effective use of guerrilla warfare and environmental tactics (underground tunnels, booby traps, sabotage) by the Vietcong and Vietminh.
Vietnamisation: Nixon’s strategic withdrawal policy from Vietnam indicating the failure of USA’s attempt to prevent Vietnam from becoming a communist state.
The end of USA involvement in the Vietnam war after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords and eventual control of Vietnam under communist rule.
Other pertinent responses.

Candidates should then draw their arguments to a close with appropriate conclusions.

Example Essay based on the above:

Title: The Failure of American Strategies in the Vietnam War (1963-1975): An Analytical Overview

Introduction

The Vietnam War (1963-1975) is an enduring symbol of the failure of American military might against a largely rural, determined insurgency, the Vietcong. This essay agrees with the assertion that the United States’ tactics and strategies against the Vietcong during this period were a dismal failure, given the historical evidence. The strategic miscalculations and failures will be analyzed, including the Safe Village policy, the introduction of chemical defoliants, and the unsuccessful attempts to separate the guerrillas from villagers.

The Unconventional War

As early as 1962, the United States had identified Vietnam not as a conventional battleground like WWII, but as a theater for countering communist influence, underpinned by the fear of the Domino Theory. This strategy led to the implementation of the ‘Safe Village’ policy, designed to isolate the Vietcong from villagers. However, this policy failed because the Vietcong effectively operated within the villages themselves.

Chemical Warfare and Unintended Consequences

Operation Ranch Hand, initiated in 1962, introduced the use of chemical defoliants like Agent Orange and Agent Blue, aimed at environmental warfare by destroying forests and crops. However, these tactics did not effectively weaken the Vietcong, and instead caused substantial environmental damage and international condemnation, turning global public opinion against the United States.

Moreover, the application of chemical weapons, notably Napalm gas, resulted in widespread civilian casualties and atrocities such as the My Lai massacre in March 1968, which further fueled anti-war sentiment in the United States and abroad. This further strained the United States’ already fragile credibility and exacerbated support for the Vietcong.

Misjudgment of Guerrilla Tactics

The U.S. notably failed to anticipate and effectively respond to the guerrilla warfare tactics employed by the Vietcong. These tactics, which included the use of underground tunnels, booby traps, sabotage, and hit-and-run attacks, were instrumental in the Vietcong’s resilience against the American military.

The Tet Offensive of 1968 was a clear example of the Vietcong’s ability to adapt and respond to the U.S. strategies. The surprise attacks on over 100 U.S.-controlled cities not only challenged the American military but also deeply impacted the U.S. home front, leading to increased anti-war demonstrations. This, coupled with the deployment of young and inexperienced soldiers, further weakened the U.S. efforts.

Failed De-escalation and Withdrawal

Towards the end of the war, the United States tried to employ a strategy of “Vietnamisation” under President Nixon, aimed at strategically withdrawing U.S. troops while bolstering South Vietnam’s ability to combat communism. The policy, dubbed WHAM (Winning the Hearts and Minds of the Vietnamese), was largely seen as an admission of the failure of U.S. strategies and led to the eventual withdrawal of all U.S. troops by 1973, following the Paris Peace Accords.

In conclusion, the American tactics and strategies against the Vietcong during the Vietnam War (1963-1975) were indeed a dismal failure. Not only did they fail to curtail the Vietcong, but they also led to significant civilian casualties, alienated global public opinion, and failed to prevent Vietnam’s unification under communist rule. The inability to adapt to guerrilla warfare, coupled with strategic missteps, such as the Safe Village policy and the application of chemical warfare, resulted in the U.S. failing to achieve its objectives in Vietnam. Thus, this period represents a sobering lesson in the limitations of conventional warfare against determined and adaptable insurgencies.

Question 2:

The USA withdrew from Vietnam in 1975 because the war became more difficult and the public at home was turning against the USA’s participation. Do you agree with the statement? Support your answers with relevant historical evidence.

Introduction: In this response, I will agree with the statement and provide a comprehensive argument showcasing the difficulties faced by America in the Vietnam War and how public sentiment turned against the conflict.

Elaboration:

The Vietnam War presented numerous challenges for the United States, ultimately leading to a shift in public opinion against the war. Several key factors contributed to this shift:

Geneva agreement and division of Vietnam: The Geneva agreement of 1954 divided Vietnam into North and South, setting the stage for the conflict. South Vietnam, under President Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to hold elections, leading to discontent among the Vietnamese people.
The rise of the Vietcong: The communist Vietcong emerged in South Vietnam, starting a guerrilla war against the government. Their tactics included booby traps, underground tunnels, surprise attacks, and hit-and-run strategies, making it difficult for the United States to combat them effectively.
USA’s involvement and rationale: The United States entered the war based on the principles of containment and the domino theory, fearing the spread of communism. They provided weapons and advisors to South Vietnam, while the Vietcong received support from China, Russia, and the Vietminh via the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Failures and setbacks: Despite implementing strategies like the safe village policy and Operation Rolling Thunder, the United States struggled to quell the Vietcong’s insurgency. The safe village policy failed as the Vietcong operated within the villages, and Operation Rolling Thunder did not succeed in destroying the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Public disillusionment and media exposure: The use of chemical weapons, such as Agent Orange and Agent Blue, by the United States, turned the Vietnamese population against them. Additionally, televised coverage of the war exposed the horrors faced by both soldiers and civilians, leading many Americans to question the justification and morality of their country’s involvement.
Tet Offensive and its aftermath: The Tet Offensive in 1968, where the Vietcong launched surprise attacks and captured numerous cities, caused heavy casualties among U.S. forces. The offensive and subsequent events, including US atrocities like the My Lai massacre, further fueled anti-war sentiment and intensified protests within the United States.
Vietnamization and withdrawal: President Nixon implemented the Vietnamization policy, which involved the gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops while South Vietnam continued the fight against the Vietcong. Eventually, all U.S. troops were withdrawn by 1973, and in 1975, North Vietnam took control of Saigon, unifying the country under a communist government.

Conclusion: The Vietnam War posed significant challenges for the United States, with the public opinion gradually turning against the conflict due to a combination of factors. The unconventional tactics employed by the Vietcong, the disillusionment caused by media exposure, and the inability of the U.S. to achieve decisive victories all contributed to the changing perception of the war. Ultimately, the United States withdrew its troops, and the communist forces emerged victorious. The Vietnam War stands as a stark reminder of the complexities of warfare and the crucial role public opinion plays in shaping the outcomes of such conflicts.

Title: The American Withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975: A Confluence of Military Challenges and Domestic Opposition

I concur with the statement that the USA withdrew from Vietnam in 1975 largely due to the escalating difficulty of the war and the burgeoning opposition at home. This essay will argue this position using relevant historical evidence and will explore the multi-faceted reasons for this turn of events, encompassing both geopolitical considerations and socio-political dynamics.

The Military Quagmire

The Geneva Accords of 1954 divided Vietnam into North and South, setting a stage ripe for conflict. When South Vietnam’s leader Diem refused to hold reunification elections, fearing communist victory, this led to the formation of the communist Viet Cong, backed by North Vietnam, China, and Russia. The USA, driven by Cold War ideologies of containment and the domino theory, provided support to South Vietnam to counter this threat. However, they grossly underestimated the complexity of the war.

The Viet Cong’s successful guerrilla tactics and intimate knowledge of the terrain posed a formidable challenge to the US forces. They were farmers by day and freedom fighters by night, often indistinguishable from the civilian population, and used intricate networks of tunnels and booby traps to launch surprise attacks. This innovative warfare, coupled with the harsh jungle environment, made American military operations – including Operation Rolling Thunder aimed at destroying the Ho Chi Minh Trail – largely ineffective.

The Domino Effect at Home

Meanwhile, at home, the American public sentiment was changing. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which led to the escalation of US involvement, had initially galvanized support for the war. However, as the war dragged on with mounting casualties – the Tet Offensive alone resulted in 14,000 US casualties – and little progress, public opinion began to sour.

The widespread use of television brought the horrors of the war into American homes. The brutalities of the war, such as the My Lai massacre, and the use of controversial chemical weapons like Agent Orange, sparked public outcry. The war became increasingly unpopular, leading to widespread anti-war protests and a general consensus that the war was unwinnable. The pressure to withdraw was further intensified by revelations about the government’s deceit in managing public perceptions of the war, notably exposed in the Pentagon Papers.

The Path to Withdrawal

By 1969, with domestic opposition escalating and the war showing no signs of a decisive victory, President Nixon initiated the policy of Vietnamization. This policy aimed at training South Vietnamese forces to take over the fight while gradually withdrawing US troops. This marked a significant shift in US strategy, effectively signaling the impending end of direct US involvement.

In 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed, leading to the complete withdrawal of US troops. However, without American support, South Vietnam fell to the communist forces, and Saigon was captured in 1975, marking the end of the Vietnam War.

In conclusion, the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975 was indeed the result of a combination of the war’s growing difficulty and escalating domestic opposition. The military challenges were underscored by the Viet Cong’s effective guerrilla tactics and the unfavorable environmental conditions, while domestic opposition was fueled by a disillusioned and protesting public. This historic event illustrates the profound impact of both military realities on the ground and public sentiment at home in shaping the course of foreign policy and military involvement.

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HISTORY T1 W3 Gr. 12: THE EXTENSION OF THE COLD WAR: CASE STUDY: VIETNAM

ESSAY: THE EXTENSION OF THE COLD WAR: CASE STUDY: VIETNAM

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Vietnam War Essay Grade 12 PDF Download

The Vietnam War: A Comprehensive Overview

Introduction

The Vietnam War, a protracted and controversial conflict, left an indelible mark on the world stage. This essay delves into the origins, key events, and lasting impacts of the war, providing a comprehensive understanding of its complexities and far-reaching consequences.

Origins of the Conflict

The roots of the Vietnam War can be traced back to the French colonial period. After World War II, the communist-led Viet Minh movement sought independence from French rule. In 1954, the Geneva Accords divided Vietnam into two zones: North Vietnam under communist control and South Vietnam under anti-communist leadership.

Escalation and American Involvement

As the Cold War intensified, the United States became increasingly concerned about the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. In 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin incident provided a pretext for the US to escalate its involvement in the conflict. American troops were deployed in large numbers, and the war intensified.

Tet Offensive (1968): A major offensive by North Vietnamese forces that shook American confidence in the war effort.
My Lai Massacre (1968): The brutal killing of hundreds of civilians by American soldiers, tarnishing the US’s reputation.
Paris Peace Accords (1973): An agreement that ended US involvement in the war and set a timeline for the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops.
Fall of Saigon (1975): The final victory of North Vietnam, leading to the reunification of the country under communist rule.

Impacts of the War

Human Cost:

The war claimed the lives of millions of Vietnamese civilians and soldiers, as well as thousands of American troops.
The use of defoliants, such as Agent Orange, had devastating long-term health effects on both Vietnamese and American veterans.

Political and Social Impacts:

The war led to a deep division within American society, with protests and anti-war movements becoming widespread.
The war also had a significant impact on the political landscape of Southeast Asia, shaping the region’s post-war development.

Economic Impacts:

The war imposed a heavy financial burden on the United States, costing billions of dollars.
The war also disrupted the Vietnamese economy, leading to widespread poverty and infrastructure damage.

Legacy and Lessons

The Vietnam War remains a complex and controversial topic, with its legacy still being debated today. The war taught valuable lessons about the dangers of military intervention, the importance of understanding cultural differences, and the limits of American power.

Facts in South Africa

Historical Context:

South Africa was under apartheid rule from 1948 to 1994, a system of racial segregation and discrimination.
The African National Congress (ANC) led the fight against apartheid, advocating for a democratic and non-racial society.

Key Figures:

Nelson Mandela: A prominent anti-apartheid activist and leader of the ANC, who spent 27 years in prison.
F.W. de Klerk: The last apartheid-era president, who initiated negotiations with the ANC.

Transition to Democracy:

In 1990, de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC and other anti-apartheid organizations.
In 1994, the first multi-racial elections were held, resulting in a victory for the ANC.
Mandela became the first democratically elected president of South Africa.

Challenges and Achievements:

Post-apartheid South Africa faced significant challenges, including poverty, inequality, and racial tensions.
The country has made progress in addressing these issues, implementing policies to promote economic growth and social justice.
South Africa is now a vibrant and diverse democracy, with a strong constitution and a commitment to human rights.

The Vietnam War and the transition to democracy in South Africa are two complex and transformative events that have shaped the world we live in today. Understanding their origins, key events, and lasting impacts is essential for gaining a deeper appreciation of the challenges and triumphs of the human experience.

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Resources teachers, parents and learners can use!

Grade 12 CAPS History Lesson Plan: The Vietnam War

Materials needed:.

Maps of Vietnam showing key locations and military movements during the war.
Timeline of major events before, during, and after the Vietnam War.
Documentary clips that cover different aspects of the Vietnam War, including geopolitical context and personal stories from veterans and civilians.
Primary source documents, such as photographs, letters from soldiers, and government documents.
Articles and essays on the effects of the Vietnam War on both Vietnam and the United States.
Discussion prompts to encourage critical thinking and analysis.

Learning Objectives:

Learners will outline the causes and consequences of the Vietnam War.
Learners will analyze the geopolitical context of the Cold War that led to the Vietnam conflict.
Learners will evaluate the impact of the Vietnam War on Vietnam, the United States, and global politics.

Anticipated Challenges and Solutions:

Challenge: The political and military complexities of the Vietnam War might be difficult for students to understand.
Solution: Use a combination of simplified explanations, timelines, and visual aids to break down complex events and strategies. Provide varied perspectives to enrich understanding.

Lesson Outline:

Start with a brief overview of Vietnam’s history relevant to the conflict, focusing on its colonial past under French rule and the division between North and South Vietnam.
Discuss the global tension during the Cold War era that influenced the Vietnam War. Explain the domino theory and its role in American involvement. Use maps and timelines to support the explanation.
Use a detailed timeline to guide the class through key events of the Vietnam War, including the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, major battles like the Tet Offensive, and the eventual withdrawal of American forces.
Show documentary clips to provide a visual understanding of the conditions and key moments during the war.
Provide students with different primary sources, including media from the time, letters from soldiers, and images. Have students analyze these in small groups, discussing what these sources tell us about the perspectives and realities of the war.
Discuss the aftermath of the war for Vietnam and the United States, including the fall of Saigon and the war’s long-term effects on American foreign policy and society.
Engage students in a discussion about the lessons learned from the Vietnam War and how it has shaped perceptions of military intervention.
Organize a debate on a contentious issue, such as “Was American involvement in Vietnam justified?” Use discussion prompts to encourage critical thinking and ensure all students participate.
Conclude the lesson by summarizing key points. Assign students to write a reflective essay on how the Vietnam War illustrates the complexities of international conflicts and their consequences.

TEACHING NOTES:

This lesson plan is structured to provide Grade 12 learners with a comprehensive understanding of the Vietnam War, one of the most controversial conflicts in 20th-century history. The lesson combines direct instruction with interactive elements such as documentary viewing, primary source analysis, and class debates to engage students and deepen their understanding of historical complexities.

By analyzing the Vietnam War from multiple perspectives, students are encouraged to think critically about the causes, consequences, and moral questions raised by the war. This approach not only meets the goals of the CAPS curriculum but also helps students develop the skills necessary for thoughtful engagement with historical narratives and their relevance to contemporary issues.

Education About Asia: Online Archives

Exploring the vietnam war: a teacher’s resource essay.

He didn’t even hear what I said; he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined . . . to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world.” ––Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955) 1

The purpose of this essay is to provide classroom instructors and other interested parties with a review of a range of readings, films, and documentaries about the Vietnam War. The eight areas presented explore the conflict in its complexity, from background to culture to the legacy for US foreign policy. The areas can be shaped into instructional units, with readings and films chosen with a secondary school or college audience in mind.

Vietnam’s French Colonial Background

Before the American war came the French colonial experience, establishing Indochina as a far-flung colonial outpost, enriching the mother country while brutally suppressing resistance. From the 1870s to the 1950s, the French regime raised generations of Vietnamese civil servants, who developed cultural and intellectual ties with their occupiers. A class of Western-educated nationalists emerged in the twentieth century who denounced the foreign occupation and called for self-determination. Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietnamese Communist Party, was in the forefront. Much of Ho’s popular appeal can be read and dissected in Bernard Fall’s edited volume, Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings, 1920–1966 (1967). These primary sources offer an idea of the hope Ho offered to so many Vietnamese who chafed and suffered under French domination. The best biography on Ho is William J. Duker’s Ho Chi Minh: A Life (2000). Graham Greene’s graceful novel, The Quiet American (1955), captures the mood of the French under siege, while foreshadowing the American experience. The French were defeated in 1954 by the communist Viet Minh.

A familiarity with the French colonial experience in Vietnam is important for Americans’ study, as the Americans ignored or misread the lessons from the French failure. The French war was also America’s initial entry, as the US funded 80 percent of the war by 1954, as a Cold War fight against communism. The first chapter of George C. Herring’s excellent work, America’s Longest War (1979), “A Dead-End Alley: The United States, France and the First Indochina War, 1950–1954,” is a fine introduction to France’s defeat and America’s entry onto the scene. Indeed, Herring’s book is well worth reading in its entirety, for both high school and college classes. In addition, for this first unit on the war I strongly recommend the 1983 PBS “American Experience” series, V ietnam: A Television History, beginning with Episode I: “Roots of a War (1945–1953).”

US Objectives in Cold War Context, the Case for the War and Reasons Lost

a building with pillars sits above a line of people trying to enter.

The rationale that led America into Vietnam must be placed firmly into the Cold War mindset. In the years after World War II, US policymakers perceived communism as a near-monolithic entity. Thus, the communist and anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam played upon US fears of communist global expansion: Russia, 1917; Eastern Europe and Poland, post-1945; China and North Korea, 1949; Tibet, 1951; North Vietnam, 1954; and Cuba, 1959. As Herring writes, although Indochina was considered by the Americans to be “important for its raw materials, rice, and naval bases . . . it was deemed far more significant for the presumed effect its loss would have on other areas,” otherwise known as “the domino theory.” 2 If South Vietnam fell, then “Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Malaya (and then, successively, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia) would ‘fall to the Communists’ in their proper order.” 3

The answer was the “containment doctrine,” established during the Truman administration, and pursued, with variations, on through the 1980s. Students would benefit from reading George Kennan’s 1946 “Long Telegram” sent from the US Embassy in Moscow to Washington, DC, in which Kennan argued that Soviet encroachments be contained at every opportunity, meeting force with force. Kennan’s telegram is a seminal document in Cold War history. 4 Although the threat of communist expansion was the primary concern in Vietnam for Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, additional motives included US credibility and domestic political concerns, with administrations fearful of seeming to appease totalitarian aggression.

For a counterbalance to more mainstream histories, I also find useful Howard Zinn’s chapter, “The Impossible Victory: Vietnam,” in his classic polemic, A People’s History of the United States (1980). Zinn presents a critical leftist perspective, stressing US economic motives behind the nation’s overseas ventures. Focusing on the disconnect between official democratic principles and cynical self-interest, his work can be counted on to provoke lively class discussions.

For documentaries, I strongly recommend Errol Morris’ The Fog of War , which won an Academy Award in 2003. The film presents a series of interview clips with Robert McNamara, Kennedy and Johnson’s Secretary of Defense and a key architect of the war. An eighty-five-year-old McNamara reflects on Vietnam, the danger of too much power, Cold War presumptions, and mistakes that were made, interspersed with combat footage.

While the antiwar movement opposed the basic tenets of why the US should involve itself in Vietnam, plenty of bipartisan foreign policy experts were firmly convinced that America was both morally and strategically justified in seeking to contain North Vietnam. Richard Nixon asserted in No More Vietnams (1985) that the conflict was no civil war, but rather, “the Vietnam War was the Korean war with jungles,” in which a hostile communist force “camouflaged its invasion to look like a civil war,” while undertaking a stream of ceaseless border crossings while supporting the Viet Cong. 5 The American media and antiwar movement are both singled out by Nixon, but also the failure of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to explain “what we were fighting for,” thus failing to secure enduring public support. 6 Nixon also blamed the US Congress for allowing Saigon to fall in the two years following America’s withdrawal.

Nixon’s polemical book is useful in providing an alternate perspective to the antiwar critique, whether in explaining the US justification or in de-romanticizing Ho Chi Minh, whose 1950s agrarian policies sparked “major peasant revolts,” resulting in the deaths of 50,000 North Vietnamese. 7 Additional arguments for support of the war are to be found in Robert F. Kennedy’s oral interviews in Robert Kennedy: In His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (1991), edited by Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman, and in Lyndon Johnson’s memoir, The Vantage Point: Perspectives on the Presidency, 1963–1969 (1971).

a billboard with a woman and "Vietnam" on it

As arguments are studied for the war’s justification, so should debates be reviewed on why the war was lost. The issue of whether the American media helped lose the war and the theory of an “oppositional” media are discussed by Melvin Small in Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves . 8 In Nixon Reconsidered (1994), a largely positive reevaluation, Joan Hoff reviews flaws in the 1973 peace agreement, which was essentially forced upon South Vietnam’s President Thieu, with Nixon threatening an “immediate termination of U.S. economic and military assistance” if Thieu did not sign the document. 9

In We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young , Retired Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore in his final chapter, “Reflections and Perceptions,” singles out flaws in US military and political policy as to why America failed in Vietnam, including one-year tours of duty and frequent officer rotations. Failure also resulted from losing the hearts and minds of the populace by bombing heavily populated areas. “None of us,” Moore wrote, “had joined the Army to hurt children and frighten peaceful farm families.” 10 Nor would the American people condone the ongoing losses as the years passed, despite superior firepower. Even with a “kill ratio of 10–1 or even 20–1” against the enemy, eventually Americans would demand that the troops come home, mission accomplished or not. 11

The Face of War

As historian John Dower once wrote, “atrocities follow war as the jackal follows a wounded beast.” 12 Vietnam was no different, and, like Dower’s own area of expertise on the Pacific War, the war in Vietnam was carried out between peoples of different races, languages, and cultures; cruelty, racism, and dehumanization followed in its wake. Certainly, atrocities occurred on both sides, from the 1968 massacre by US soldiers in the village of My Lai, to the mass executions by communist forces in the city of Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive. For students to form an accurate perception of the face of the Vietnam War, works that present the American soldier’s experience should also include a feel for the camaraderie, the stultifying dullness, the struggles against heat, loneliness, brutality, loss, and fear.

Mark Baker’s Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women who Fought There (1981) is a collection of veterans’ oral histories, at times starkly graphic, and cannot fail to hold students’ attention. “You can’t tell who’s your enemy,” one veteran recalled. “You got to shoot kids, you got to shoot women. You don’t want to. You may be sorry that you did. But you might be sorrier if you didn’t.” 13 Other veteran accounts include Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did to Us (1983), with accounts gathered by reporters Peter Goldman and Tony Fuller; Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977); Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (1985), edited by Bernard Edelman; and Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk (1983), a fascinating account by a US helicopter pilot who flew more than one thousand combat missions in Vietnam. Of these works, Baker’s Nam is the most graphic, in terms of violence, language, and brutality, and thus should be read carefully by the teacher before the book is assigned, since the material is disturbing. For a popular fictional treatment, many fine examples exist, but perhaps the best remains Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990).

On the other side, Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War (1991) is a novel by a North Vietnamese Army veteran. One of 500 soldiers who served in the North’s 27th Youth Brigade, and one of only ten who survived, Ninh was seventeen when he joined the war and twenty-three when it ended. His novel has become a literary classic. Nor did the decade following Hanoi’s victory bring the longed-for reconciliation for which many had hoped, as Truong Nhu Tang makes clear in A Viet Cong Memoir (1985), written with David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai. A former guerrilla who served as Minister of Justice after the war, Tang’s bitter disillusionment with postwar Vietnam eventually forced him into exile. For an excellent visual, the National Geographic documentary, Vietnam’s Unseen War: Pictures from the Other Side (2002), offers a series of interviews and photographs by North Vietnamese photographers, giving more of a face to “the faceless enemy” in the jungle.

For American POWs, the war included the nightmare of internment. A useful account of one American POW’s experience in Hanoi’s notorious French-built Hoa Lo Prison is Jeremiah A. Denton, Jr.’s When Hell Was in Session (1976). Lionel Chetwynd’s dramatic film, Hanoi Hilton (1987), offers stark images for viewers unused to seeing American POWs at the mercy of others. The documentary Return with Honor (2001), directed by Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders, depicts the POWs’ plight and their return to America.

The Antiwar Movement

image of a pin that says "march on washington, End the war in Vietnam, April 17, 1965"

Much has been written on the anti-Vietnam War movement, and abundant films and documentaries are readily available. Two comprehensive tomes are Tom Wells’s The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (1994), and Terry H. Anderson’s The Movement and the Sixties (1995). Born on the Fourth of July (1976) by Ron Kovic is an excellent choice for high school audiences, presenting Kovic’s journey from an all-American high school athlete who comes home from the war in a wheelchair and becomes a spokesman for the antiwar movement. The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (1984), edited by Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert, is an excellent compendium of primary sources that cover six main areas, from the cultural to the political and from the moderate to the extreme.

Although the dominant popular perception of the sixties generation depicts a “politically and socially rebellious” youth, a 1989 Gallup poll found otherwise. Among those surveyed who came of political age during the sixties, “large majorities . . . say they did not get involved in anti-war or civil rights movements, did not smoke marijuana on a regular basis or experiment with psychedelic drugs, and did not ‘dress like a hippie.’” 14 Paul Lyons’ work, Class of ’66 , is a wonderful corrective in this area. Indeed, as Godfrey Hodgson wrote in America in Our Time (1976), the 1968 “swing of public opinion against the war did not mean that the peace movement had succeeded in achieving its dream of mass conversion.” 15 While a growing majority conceded that the war had become “a mess,” that did not mean they were ready to mount the barricades—far from it. Instead, the curious situation arose in which “most of those who disliked the war, disliked the peace movement even more.” 16

A cover for the documentary. Says: "The Weather Underground: We are the outlaws, free and high--a youth guerrilla underground in the heart of honky America"

The collection Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties is a useful resource containing reflections by three dozen former activists. A common theme in the section “Second Thoughts on Vietnam” is how, after 1975 and the ensuing communist repression in both Vietnam and Cambodia, many New Leftists who had cheered communist-driven wars of national liberation later ignored or sought to discredit reports that reflected poorly on the new communist regimes. As one writer stated, “such methods of imposing the Party’s power over a newly ‘liberated’ society have been a part of every Communist victory since 1917.” 17 Another writer spoke of the inherent danger of romanticizing “the other side,” a pitfall experienced not only by the New Leftists but also by “old leftists” who glorified Stalin in the 1930s. 18 A fine study on the evils that befell Cambodia and the danger of romanticizing guerrillas of any stripe is William Shawcross’s Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger and the Destruction of Cambodia (1979), which indicts the Nixon administration for destabilizing fragile, neutral Cambodia, leading to the Khmer Rouge’s seizure of power and the genocidal slaughter of over a million Cambodians.

Perhaps the best documentary of the protest movement is Berkeley in the Sixties (1990), directed by Mark Kitchell. In the previously-mentioned Vietnam: A Television History series, the antiwar movement is portrayed in the episode “Homefront USA.” For a look at the most radical and violent protest group that arose from the sixties, The Weather Underground (2003), directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, shows the radicalization of a small band of revolutionaries who sought to bring down the US government, with their reflections thirty years later. Together these documentaries provide a fine cross-section of the protest movement, from those who advocated peace to those who sought to end the war and change society through far more violent means.

Culture Clash: America and Vietnam

The great cultural, linguistic, political, and historical differences that separated the Americans from the Vietnamese contributed to the war’s tragedy, fueled by the frustration that arose between mutually uncomprehending people. “America was involved in Vietnam for thirty years, but never understood the Vietnamese,” wrote Loren Baritz in his work Backfire (1985). 19 Vietnamese men, for example, had the custom of holding hands in public with their friends. For American youths raised on John Wayne films, this practice repelled many GIs who felt that their Asian allies were either effeminate or cowards, prompting them to wonder “why Americans had to die in defense of perverts.” 20 Baritz’s first chapter, “God’s Country and American Know-How,” is particularly informative as to the clash of cultures, though the entire book offers much insight.

Another excellent place to start for exploring cultural differences is Frances Fitzgerald’s landmark work, Fire in the Lake (1972), in which each culture’s view of the historical process differed, which affected their view of revolution. Traditional Vietnamese view history as cyclical, in keeping with their life as an agrarian-based people, while Westerners view history as a path of progression, with humanity emerging from a state of chaos to eventual order and stability. Thus, whereas Westerners tend to perceive revolution as “an abrupt reversal in the order of society, a violent break in history,” Vietnamese view it as “the cleansing fire to burn away the rot of the old order.” 21 In Vietnam, Americans were in the unenviable position of supporting the old order, a pro-Western series of anti-communist governments, which the French had left in their wake. As for documentaries, Peter Davis‘s classic work Hearts and Minds (1974) presents tragic and starkly contrasting images of cultural differences and the Americans’ involvement in Vietnam. The film should be viewed in advance by the instructor due to images of violence and, more rarely, nudity.

The War and America’s Cinematic Memory: Reality, Fantasy, and Remorse

Far from the more “patriotic” films arising from the World War II and Korean War eras, such as Back to Bataan (1945), Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), and Pork Chop Hill (1959), the Vietnam-era films, with the exception of John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), are marked by a suspicion of authority in general––particularly military and political. This was the generation of writers and directors who learned of official lies during the war by Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Nixon’s own conduct of the war, including prolonged secret bombings of Cambodia by US warplanes, and capped off by the Watergate scandals, resulted in many Americans en masse experiencing a deep distrust of their government.

Beyond the political perspective of many of these films, Hollywood—and US citizens—were coming to terms with the kind of damage America had wrought on Vietnam, and the kind of harm inflicted on US soldiers, their families, and survivors. Out of a rich tapestry of films, part fantasy, part reality, and much soul-searching, many are worth noting, but I shall mention only a few. Francis Ford Coppola’s fanciful Apocalpyse Now (1979) offers an image of the American war effort’s descent into chaos, though it is likely to raise more questions than it answers. A harrowing depiction is Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), the director himself a Vietnam vet. The scene in which an entire Vietnamese village is nearly wiped out by tense, frustrated, and angry US soldiers recalls the My Lai massacre. Hamburger Hill (1987), directed by Jon Irvin, deals with a specific battle and is brutal in its realism. Coming Home (1978), directed by Hal Ashby, focuses on the hardship experienced by returning veterans and their families. At the end of the film a paraplegic vet, played by Jon Voight, delivers a speech to a high school audience that is particularly moving, in which he expresses remorse for actions taken while “killing for one’s country.”

Lessons learned (or not): “No more Vietnams”

The anguish that the war inflicted upon the American psyche left a legacy that continues to impact US foreign policy, providing a ripe and relevant area for student research. In the thirty years since 1975, with each new military foray, cries are issued on the danger of the US finding itself once more in “another quagmire.” In his account of the Reagan presidency, as Reagan’s former Secretary of State, George Shultz bemoaned the “Vietnam syndrome.” “The Vietnam War had left one indisputable legacy,” Schultz wrote: “massive press, public, and congressional anxiety that the United States—at all costs—avoid getting mired in ‘another Vietnam.’” 22 In 1991, after America and its allies succeeded in pushing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush publicly declared, “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” 23 Yet, amid the Serbian and Croatian acts of genocide in the Balkans, Bush “was slow to act” due to “the ghosts of Vietnam” and “the great fear of being sucked into a Balkan quagmire.” 24

Former antiwar protester Bill Clinton would himself face the Vietnam legacy in determining US foreign policy. Clinton pulled out the troops after eighteen US servicemen died in civil-war-torn Somalia. He experienced the same fears of over-engagement when he ordered limited air strikes on Serbia during the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts, though he emerged successful and limited US objectives were achieved.

His successor, George W. Bush, went deeper. By December 2005, towards the end of the third year of Bush’s war in Iraq, with roughly 2,200 US soldiers dead, many politicians began calling for an exit strategy. “We are locked into a bogged-down problem not . . . dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam,” stated Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, himself a highly decorated Vietnam veteran. “We should start figuring out how we get out of there.” 25 Former Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright struck a middle ground, stating, “The American military [in Iraq] is both the problem and the solution. They are a magnet [for insurgents] but they’re also helping with security.” 26 Democratic politicians attacked each other for fear of seeming weak. 27 For his part, President Bush maintained that US forces in Iraq would emerge victorious, promising “complete victory,” in which US forces would eventually withdraw as Iraqi forces increased their level of readiness against the insurgency. 28 As with Vietnam, politicians of both parties were increasingly caught between their record of past support, public discontent, perceived US interests, political vulnerability, and a faith in America’s potential for good amidst a sea of troubles.

Disputing Vietnam comparisons, military historian Victor Davis Hanson emphasizes that the number of US war dead in Iraq after two and a half years of war in no way approximated the far higher losses in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Since the 1970s, American expectations as to its own capabilities have increased. In a war that seeks to defeat guerrillas and where victories are not measured by ground taken, “our growing intolerance of any battlefield losses” will only meet with frustration when US wars are fought without quick and easy victories. 29

Vietnam Today

As the communist forces neared Saigon in the spring of 1975, the US military’s Stars and Stripes predicted in a bold headline that “AT LEAST A MILLION VIETNAMESE WILL BE SLAUGHTERED.” 30 The anticipated bloodbath did not come, though severe hardship and repression did. For an excellent firsthand account of the prisons and re-education camps under post-1975 communist rule in Vietnam, see The Vietnamese Gulag (1986), by Doan Van Toai and David Chanoff. What followed was an eventual “exodus of boat people, a transformative flotilla that would carry one million South Vietnamese—about five percent of the South’s population,” to lands overseas. 31 It would take years before the country established a sense of normalcy.

I thus recommend closing the unit on the Vietnam War with a glimpse of Vietnam today, thirty years after the country’s reunification and the fall of Saigon. In addition to my own teaching and research over the years, my knowledge was greatly enhanced by a summer 2004 trip to Vietnam with Pacific Village Institute, led by John Eastman. I was most impressed by the sheer energy of the Vietnamese, their friendliness, optimism, and eagerness embracing newfound opportunities currently available through the government’s policy of increased economic liberalism and the encouragement of small private enterprise.

Whatever the instructor’s political views, whether judging Vietnam’s current economic trend as a cause for “free world” celebration or one of leftist utopian mourning, the fact remains that the Vietnamese standard of living and per capita income are both on the rise, after decades of economic mismanagement and stringent government control. 32 Although censorship of the press and restricted civil liberties are as one would expect in a one-party state, a look at Vietnam at the dawn of the twenty-first century provides a positive area for students to discuss and an upbeat note to end on, in a unit that focuses on the grim reality of war. As veteran war reporter David Lamb stated in his excellent work Vietnam Now (2002), the cautious moves by the Vietnamese government have resulted in a country that “remains closer to impoverished Laos than it does to developing Thailand. Yet,” Lamb adds, “the Vietnamese have always had staying power and been good at capitalizing on opportunity; their country brims with potential.” 33 This potential, which the country is in the process of realizing, is reason enough for an in-depth study of the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese people, and the nation they are becoming.

Article contents

The vietnam war and american military strategy, 1965–1973.

Gregory A. Daddis Gregory A. Daddis Department of History, United States Military Academy West Point
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.239
Published online: 02 March 2015

For nearly a decade, American combat soldiers fought in South Vietnam to help sustain an independent, noncommunist nation in Southeast Asia. After U.S. troops departed in 1973, the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 prompted a lasting search to explain the United States’ first lost war. Historians of the conflict and participants alike have since critiqued the ways in which civilian policymakers and uniformed leaders applied—some argued misapplied—military power that led to such an undesirable political outcome. While some claimed U.S. politicians failed to commit their nation’s full military might to a limited war, others contended that most officers fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the war they were fighting. Still others argued “winning” was essentially impossible given the true nature of a struggle over Vietnamese national identity in the postcolonial era. On their own, none of these arguments fully satisfy. Contemporary policymakers clearly understood the difficulties of waging a war in Southeast Asia against an enemy committed to national liberation. Yet the faith of these Americans in their power to resolve deep-seated local and regional sociopolitical problems eclipsed the possibility there might be limits to that power. By asking military strategists to simultaneously fight a war and build a nation, senior U.S. policymakers had asked too much of those crafting military strategy to deliver on overly ambitious political objectives. In the end, the Vietnam War exposed the limits of what American military power could achieve in the Cold War era.

counterinsurgency
limited war
Vietnam War
Westmoreland

Introduction

By mid-June 1951, the Korean War had settled into an uneasy, yet conspicuous stalemate. Having blunted North Korean and Chinese offensives that killed thousands of soldiers and civilians, the United Nations forces, now under command of General Matthew B. Ridgway, dug in as both sides agreed to open negotiations. Though the enemy had suffered heavily under the weight of allied ground and air power, Washington and its partners had little stomach to press northward. As the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff declared, the objective was to effect “an end to the fighting . . . and a return to the status quo.” 1 Thus, President Harry Truman’s decision in April to relieve General Douglas MacArthur—who in Ridgway’s words “envisaged no less than the global defeat of communism”—suggested that political limitations were now an intrinsic part of developing and implementing strategy in a time of war. Yet what was the purpose of war and strategy if not the complete destruction of enemy forces? In a time when men had “control of machines capable of laying a world to waste,” Ridgway believed escalation without restraint would lead to disaster. Civilian and military authorities had to set attainable goals and work closely in selecting the means to achieve them. 2

Ridgway’s admonitions forecast inherent problems in a Cold War period increasingly dubbed an era of “limited war.” In short, the very definition of wartime victory seemed in flux. An uncertain end to the fighting in Korea implied there were, in fact, substitutes to winning outright on the field of battle. Even if Korea demonstrated the successful application of communist containment, at least one student of strategy lamented that limited war connoted “a deliberate hobbling of tremendous power.” 3 A Manichean view of the Cold War, however, presented knotty problems for those seeking to confront seemingly expansion-minded communists without unintentionally escalating beyond some nuclear threshold. How could one fight a national war for survival against communism yet agree to negotiate an end to a stalemated war? Political scientist Robert Osgood, writing in 1957, judged there were few alternatives to contesting communists who themselves were limiting military force to “minimize the risk of precipitating total war.” For Osgood, the challenge was to think about contemporary war as more than simply a physical contest between opposing armies. “The problem of limited war is not just a problem of military strategy but is, more broadly, the problem of combining military power with diplomacy and with the economic and psychological instruments of power within a coherent national strategy that is capable of supporting the United States’ political objectives abroad.” 4

If Osgood was correct in suggesting that war required more than just an application of military power, then strategy—as a problem to be solved—entailed more than just battlefield expertise. Thus, the post–World War II generation of U.S. Army officers was forced to think about war more broadly. And they did. Far from being slaves to conventional operations, officers ascending the ranks in the 1950s to command in Vietnam understood the rising importance of local insurgency movements. As Andrew Birtle has persuasively argued, by 1965 the army had “succeeded in integrating counterinsurgency and counterguerrilla warfare in substantive ways into its doctrinal, educational, and training systems.” 5 An examination of contemporary professional journals such as Military Review reveals a military establishment wrestling with the problems of local economic and social development, the importance of community politics, and the role played by indigenous security forces. In truth, officers of the day, echoing the recommendations of Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, did not define limited wars in purely military terms. Rather, they perceived strategic problems as those involving changes in technologies, societies, and, perhaps most importantly, political ideas. 6

These same officers labored to devise a coherent strategy for a limited contest in Southeast Asia within the larger construct of the Cold War. In an important sense, the development of strategy for all combatants necessitated attention to multiple layers, all interlaced. As Lyndon Johnson recalled of Vietnam in his 1971 memoir, “It was a political war, an economic war, and a fighting war—all at the same time.” 7 Moreover, American political and military leaders found that Cold War calculations mattered just as much as the fighting inside South Vietnam. Fears of appearing weak against communism compelled the Johnson White House to escalate in 1965 when it looked like Hanoi was making its final bid for Indochinese domination. As Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara told a journalist in April, if the United States withdrew from Vietnam “there would be a complete shift of world power. Asia goes Red, our prestige and integrity damaged, allies everywhere shaken.” Thus, paraphrasing military theorist Basil Liddell Hart, policy imperatives at the level of grand strategy would set the foundations for—and later circumscribe—the application of military strategy on a lower plane. 8

Liddell Hart’s council that strategy involved more than “fighting power” would lead American officers in Vietnam into a near insolvable dilemma. Clearly, the civil war inside Vietnam was more than just a military problem. Yet in the quest to broaden their conception of war, to consider political and social issues as much as military ones, senior leaders developed a strategy that was so wide-ranging as to be unmanageable. Rather than a narrow focus on enemy attrition, sheer comprehensiveness proved to be a crucial factor undermining American strategy in Vietnam. In attempting to both destroy an adversary and build a nation, uniformed leaders overestimated their capacity to manage a conflict that had long preceded American involvement. A near unquestioning faith in the capacity to do everything overshadowed any unease with entanglement in a civil war rooted in competing notions of national liberation and identity. 9 In the end, senior U.S. policymakers had asked too much of those crafting military strategy to deliver on overly ambitious political objectives.

Devising Strategy for a New Kind of War

By June 1965, General William C. Westmoreland had been serving in the Republic of Vietnam for eighteen months. As the newly appointed commander of the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), the former West Point superintendent was heir to a legacy of varied strategic initiatives aimed at sustaining an independent, noncommunist foothold in Southeast Asia. Since the division of Vietnam along the seventeenth parallel in 1954, an American military assistance and advisory group (MAAG) had been training local forces for a threat both externally military and internally political. 10 The image of North Korean forces streaming across an international boundary in 1950 surely weighed heavily on U.S. officers. Yet these same men understood the importance of a steady economy and secure social structure in combating the growing insurgent threat inside South Vietnam. Consequently, the U.S. advisory group focused on more than just advising the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN) for conventional operations against the North Vietnam Army (NVA). 11

As advisers, however, the Americans could not dictate strategy to their Vietnamese allies. President Ngo Dinh Diem, struggling to gain popular support for his own social revolution, equally sought ways to secure the population—through programs like agrovilles and strategic hamlets—from a rising communist insurgency. Yet achieving consensus with (and between) Americans proved difficult. Staff officers debated how best to balance economic and political development with population security and the training of South Vietnamese forces. 12 Was the threat more military or political, more external or internal? Were local paramilitary forces or the conventional army better suited to dealing with these threats? All the while, a shadow government competed for influence within the countryside. When MACV was established in February 1962, its chief, Paul D. Harkins, received the mission to “assist and support the Government of South Vietnam in its efforts to provide for its internal security, defeat Communist insurgency, and resist overt aggression.” 13 Here was a tall order. Moreover, as military operations required a solid political footing for ultimate success, an unstable Saigon government further complicated American strategic planning. Following Diem’s overthrow and death in November 1963, the foundations on which the U.S. presence in South Vietnam rested appeared shaky at best. Hanoi’s own escalation in 1964 did little to assuage concern. 14

Though cognizant of the difficulties ahead, American leaders felt they had little choice but to persevere in South Vietnam. By early 1965, with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing him to “take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force” to assist South Vietnam, President Johnson believed he had little alternative but to escalate. He was in a difficult position. Hoping to preserve his domestic agenda but stand strong against communist aggression, Johnson initially hesitated on committing ground troops. Instead, he turned to airpower. Operation Rolling Thunder, launched in early March 1965, aimed at eliminating Hanoi’s support of the southern insurgency. Concurrently, Johnson hoped, in Michael Hunt’s words, to “bring a better life to the people of Vietnam—on American terms.” 15 The president would be disappointed on both counts. The punitive bombing of North Vietnam did little to interfere with Hanoi’s support of the insurgents and nothing to resolve the internal political problems of South Vietnam. Moreover, military leaders complained that the president’s gradual response, of limiting the tempo and ferocity of the air campaign, unduly limited American military might. (Few worried as restlessly as Johnson about full-blown Chinese or Soviet intervention.) By the spring, it became clear the president’s policies in South Vietnam were failing. In June, Westmoreland officially requested additional troops “as a stop-gap measure to save the ARVN from defeat.” 16

The decision to escalate in Vietnam persists as one of the most controversial in twentieth-century American foreign policy. Competing interpretations revolve around the question of purpose. Was escalation chosen as a matter of policy, of containing communism abroad? Was it used as a way to test American capacity in nation-building, of expanding democracy overseas? Or did escalation flow from concerns about prestige and credibility, both national and political? Clearly Johnson considered all these matters in the critical months of early 1965, and it is plausible to argue that the president believed he had few alternatives given reports of South Vietnam being on the verge of collapse. Yet ultimately intervention was a matter of choice. 17 Johnson feared the political ramifications and personal consequences of “losing” Vietnam just as Truman had “lost” China. Thus, when Westmoreland sent a cable to the Pentagon in early June requesting 40,000 combat troops immediately and more than 50,000 later, hasty deliberations in the White House led to support for MACV’s appeal. As McNamara later recalled, “South Vietnam seemed to be crumbling, with the only apparent antidote a massive injection of US troops.” 18

The task now fell to Westmoreland to devise an offensive strategy to use these troops. Realizing Hanoi had committed regular army regiments and battalions to South Vietnam, the MACV commander believed he had no choice but to contest this conventional threat. But he also had to provide security “from the guerrilla, the assassin, the terrorist and the informer.” 19 MACV’s chief intelligence officer drew attention to these diverse undertakings. As Phillip B. Davidson recalled, Westmoreland “had not one battle, but three to fight: first, to contain a growing enemy conventional threat; second, to develop the Republic of Vietnam’s Armed Forces (RVNAF); and third, to pacify and protect the peasants in the South Vietnamese countryside. Each was a monumental task.” 20 Far from being wedded to a battle-centric strategy aimed at racking up high body counts, Westmoreland developed a comprehensive campaign plan for employing his forces that factored in more than just killing the enemy.

Stabilization and security of South Vietnam formed the bedrock of Westmoreland’s “three-phase sustained campaign.” Phase I visualized the commitment of U.S. and allied forces “necessary to halt the losing trend by 1965.” Tasks included securing allied military bases, defending major political and population centers, and strengthening the RVNAF. In Phase II, Westmoreland sought to resume the offensive to “destroy enemy forces” and reinstitute “rural construction activities.” In this phase, aimed to begin in 1966, American forces would “participate in clearing, securing, reserve reaction and offensive operations as required to support and sustain the resumption of pacification.” Finally, in Phase III, MACV would oversee the “defeat and destruction of the remaining enemy forces and base areas.” It is important to note that Westmoreland’s plan included the term “sustained campaign.” 21 The general was under no illusions that U.S. forces were engaged in a war of annihilation aimed at the rapid destruction of the enemy. Attrition suggested that a stable South Vietnam, capable of resisting the military and political pressures of both internal and external aggressors, would not arise in a matter of months or even a few years.

Hanoi’s political and military leaders equally debated the strategic concerns of time, resources, and capabilities. Johnson’s decision to commit U.S. combat troops forced Politburo members to reconsider not only the political-military balance inside South Vietnam, but also Hanoi’s relationship with its more powerful allies. To be sure, national communists like Vo Nguyen Giap had discussed the role of a “long-term revolutionary war” strategy and the importance of political education in military training. 22 By 1965, however, the massive American buildup complicated strategic deliberations. In December, Hanoi’s leadership, increasingly under the sway of First Secretary Le Duan, promulgated Lao Dong Party Resolution 12, which outlined a basic strategy to defeat the Americans “under any circumstances.” The resolution placed greater emphasis on the military struggle as domestic priorities in the North receded into the background. As a result, Le Duan battled with senior military officials like Giap over the pace of military operations and the building of forces for a general offensive against the southern “puppets.” Escalation proved challenging for both sides. 23

The strategic decision making leading to American intervention in Vietnam illustrates the difficulties of developing and implementing strategy for a postcolonial conflict in the nuclear era. Even from Hanoi’s perspective, strategy was not a straightforward process. A sense of contingency, of choices, and of action and reaction permeate the critical years leading to 1965. Why Johnson chose war, and the restrictions he imposed on the conduct of that war, remain contentious questions. So too do inquiries into the nature of the threat that both Americans and their South Vietnamese allies faced. Finally, the relationship between political objectives and the strategy devised to accomplish those objectives offers valuable instruction to those researching the faith in, and limitations of, American power abroad during the Cold War. 24

From Escalation to Stalemate

In March 1965, the first contingent of U.S. Marines landed at Da Nang in Quang Nam province. Their mission, to defend American airbases supporting the bombing campaign against North Vietnam, called for setting up three defensive “enclaves” at Phu Bai, Da Nang, and Chu Lai. As the summer progressed and additional army units arrived in country, Westmoreland sought authorization to expand beyond his airfield security mission. If South Vietnam was to survive, the general needed to have “a substantial and hard-hitting offensive capability . . . with troops that could be maneuvered freely.” 25 With the growing recognition that Rolling Thunder was not achieving desired results, the Pentagon gave Westmoreland the green light. The MACV commander’s desires stemmed largely from his perception of the enemy. To the general, the greatest threat to South Vietnam came not from the National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgency but rather from main force units, both NLF and NVA. Westmoreland appreciated the long-term threat insurgents posed to Saigon, but he worried that since the enemy had committed larger combat units to battle, he ignored them at his peril. 26

The Americans thus undertook offensive operations to provide a shield for the population, one behind which ARVN could promote pacification in the countryside. By early October, the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division had expanded its operations into the Central Highlands, hoping to defeat the enemy and reestablish governmental control in the NLF-dominated countryside. Hanoi, however, had continued its own buildup and three North Vietnam Army regiments had joined local forces in Pleiku province near the Cambodian border. In mid-November, the cavalry’s lead battalion, using new techniques of helicopter insertion onto the battlefield, collided with the NVA. For two days the battle raged. Only the employment of B-52 strategic bombers, called in for close air support, staved off defeat. The battle of Ia Drang clearly demonstrated the necessity of conventional operations—Westmoreland could not risk NVA regiments controlling the critical Highway 19 and thus cutting South Vietnam in two. But the clash raised important questions as well. Was Ia Drang an American victory? Would such battles truly impact Hanoi’s will? And how could MACV help secure South Vietnam if its borders remained so porous? 27

Despite the attention Ia Drang drew—Westmoreland publicly called it an “unprecedented victory”—revolutionary development and nonmilitary programs never strayed far from MACV’s sights. Westmoreland continued to stress psychological operations and civic action, even in the aftermath of Ia Drang. In December, he wrote the 1st Infantry Division’s commander detailing how the buildup of forces should allow for an increased emphasis on pacification: “I am inviting this matter to your personal attention since I feel that an effective rural construction program is essential to the success of our mission.” 28 Unfortunately, these early pacification efforts seemed to be making little progress as Hanoi continued infiltrating troops into South Vietnam and desertions from the South Vietnamese armed forces rose sharply. 29 Accordingly, Westmoreland requested an additional 41,500 troops. Further deployments might be necessary. The request staggered the secretary of defense, who now realized there would be no rapid conclusion to the war. “The U.S. presence rested on a bowl of jelly,” McNamara recalled. His doubts, however, were not forceful enough to derail the president’s commitment to a secure, stable, and noncommunist South Vietnam. 30

When American and South Vietnamese leaders met at Honolulu in early February 1966, Johnson publicly reaffirmed that commitment. While Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky and Chief of State Nguyen Van Thieu pledged a “social revolution” in Vietnam, Johnson urged an expansion of the “other war,” a term increasingly used to describe allied pacification efforts. 31 Concurrently, McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk defined Westmoreland’s goals for the coming year. MACV would increase the South Vietnamese population living in secure areas by 10 percent, multiply critical roads and railroads by 20 percent, and increase the destruction of NLF and NVA base areas by 30 percent. To make sure the president’s directives were not ignored, Westmoreland was to augment the pacified population by 235,000 and ensure the defense of political and population centers under government control. The final goal directed MACV to “attrite, by year’s end, VC/PAVN forces at a rate as high as their capability to put men in the field.” 32

The Honolulu conference is a critical episode for understanding American military strategy in Vietnam. The comprehensive list of strategic objectives presented by Rusk and McNamara forced American commanders to consider the war as an effort in both construction and destruction. The conference also reinforced the necessity of thinking about strategy in broader terms than simply battle. Attrition of enemy forces was only part of a much larger whole. In one sense, pacification of the countryside was a process of trying to create political space so the government of South Vietnam (GVN) could stabilize. (The New York Times reported in April that a “crisis in Saigon” was snagging U.S. efforts.) Yet MACV’s own definition of pacification—“the military, political, economic, and social process of establishing or re-establishing local government responsive to and involving the participation of the people”—seemed problematic. 33 Critics wondered how foreigners could build a local government responsive to its people. Furthermore, the expansive nature of pacification meant U.S. troops would be asked to fight an elusive enemy while implementing a whole host of nonmilitary programs. Thus, while Westmoreland and senior commanders emphasized the importance of winning both control over and support of the Vietnamese people, American soldiers wrestled with building a political community in a land long ravaged by war. That they themselves too often brought devastation to the countryside hardly furthered the goals of pacification. 34

In important ways, waging battle—a necessity given Le Duan’s commitment to a general offensive in South Vietnam—undermined U.S. nation-building efforts in 1966 and underscored the difficulties of coordinating so many strategic actors. This management problem long had been a concern of counterinsurgency theorists. British adviser Sir Robert Thompson, a veteran of the Malayan campaign, articulated the need to find a “proper balance between the military and the civil effort, with complete coordination in all fields. Otherwise a situation will arise in which military operations produce no lasting results because they are unsupported by civil follow-up action.” 35 The reality of South Vietnam bore out Thompson’s claims. Worried about Saigon’s political collapse, American war managers too often focused on short-term, military results. The decentralized nature of strategic implementation equally made it difficult to weave provincial franchises into a larger national effort. 36

This lack of coordination led to pressures for a “single-manager” to coordinate the increasingly vast American enterprise in South Vietnam. (By the end of 1966, more than 385,000 U.S. military personnel alone were serving in country.) In May, Westmoreland incorporated a new directorate into his headquarters—Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support. While ostensibly a South Vietnamese program, CORDS redefined the allied pacification mission. 37 The directorate’s head, Ambassador Robert W. Komer, threw himself into the management problem and assigned each senior U.S. military adviser a civilian deputy for revolutionary development. MACV now provided oversight for all of the allied pacification-related programs: “territorial security forces, the whole RD effort, care and resettlement of refugees, the Chieu Hoi (“Open Arms,” or amnesty) program to bring VC [Vietcong] to the GVN side, the police program, the attempts to stimulate rural economic revival, hamlet schools, and so on.” 38 In short, CORDS assumed full responsibility for pacification.

If CORDS could be viewed as a microcosm of Westmoreland’s comprehensive strategy, it also underscored the difficulties of implementing so many programs at once. Physically controlling the population did not guarantee allied forces were making inroads against the insurgency’s political infrastructure. Improved security conditions did not necessarily win civilian “hearts and minds.” Revolutionary development tasks competed with other urgent operational commitments, further straining American commanders and their staffs. More importantly, pacification required a deeper appreciation of Vietnamese culture than most Americans possessed. 39 Senior officers labored to balance the competing requirements of attacking enemy units and performing civic action in the hamlets and villages. On the ground, many American soldiers made few distinctions between friend and foe when operating in the countryside. The army’s personnel rotation policy, under which individual soldiers served for twelve months before returning home, only exacerbated these problems. With some units experiencing a 90 percent personnel turnover within a three-month period, the pacification process was erratic at best. 40

As 1967 wore on, American journalists increasingly used words like “stalemate” and “quagmire” to describe the war in Vietnam. Early-year operations like Cedar Falls and Junction City, though inflicting heavy damage on the enemy, failed to break Hanoi’s will. At most, pacification was yielding modest results. Political instability in Saigon continued to worry U.S. embassy officials. Both the White House and MACV thus found it ever more difficult to convince Americans at home that their sacrifices were generating results. 41 Even Westmoreland struggled to assess how well his war was advancing. Body counts told only a fraction of the story. A lack of fighting in a certain district could either mean the area was pacified or the enemy was in such control that battle was unnecessary. Two years into the war, American soldiers remained unsure of their progress. (MACV and the CIA even debated the number of soldiers within the enemy’s ranks.) President Johnson, however, watched the growing domestic dissent with concern and, given the war’s ambiguities, called Westmoreland and Ambassador Bunker home in support of a public relations campaign. In three appearances in 1967 MACV’s commander reported to national audiences his views on the ongoing war. Though guarded in his commentary, Westmoreland’s tone nonetheless was optimistic given the president’s desires to disprove claims of a stalemated war. 42

Hanoi’s political and military leaders similarly deliberated their own progress in 1967. Because of the American imperialists’ “aggressive nature,” the Politburo acknowledged the southern insurgency campaign had stalemated in the countryside. Still, to Le Duan in particular, an opportunity existed. A strategic offensive might break the impasse by instigating a popular uprising in the South, thus weakening the South Vietnamese–American alliance and forcing the enemy to the negotiating table. A southern uprising might well convince the international community that the United States was unjustly fighting against an internally led popular revolution. More importantly, a military defeat of the Americans, real or perceived, might change the political context of the entire conflict. 43

During the plan’s first phase, to be executed in late 1967, NVA units would conduct conventional operations along South Vietnam’s borders to draw American forces away from urban areas and to facilitate NLF infiltration into the cities. Le Duan planned the second phase for early 1968, a coordinated offensive by insurgent and regular forces to attack allied troops and support popular uprisings in the cities and surrounding areas. Additional NVA units would reinforce the uprising in the plan’s final phase by assaulting American forces and wearing down U.S. military strength in South Vietnam. 44

Though Le Duan’s desired popular uprising failed to materialize, the general offensive launched in late January 1968 shocked most Americans, especially those watching the war at home. Commencing during the Tet holiday, communist forces attacked more than 200 cities, towns, and villages across South Vietnam. Though not completely surprised, Westmoreland had not anticipated the ability of Hanoi to coordinate an offensive of such size and scope. The allies, however, reacted quickly and the communists suffered mightily under the weight of American and South Vietnamese firepower. Yet the damage to the U.S. position in Vietnam, some argued irreparable, had been done. Even in the offensive’s first hours, senior CIA analyst George Carver predicted that “the degree of success already achieved in Saigon and around the country will adversely affect the image of the GVN (and its powerful American allies as well) in the eyes of the people.” 45 Indeed, Tet had taken a heavy psychological toll on the population. After years of U.S. assistance, the Saigon government appeared incapable of securing the country against a large-scale enemy attack. Any claims of progress seemed artificial at best, intentionally deceitful at worst.

News reports about Westmoreland’s late-February request for an additional 206,000 men, followed soon after by the president’s decision not to run for reelection, only reinforced perceptions of stalemate. Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, who replaced McNamara in early March, wondered aloud how MACV was winning the war yet needed more troops. Public opinion mirrored growing doubts within Johnson’s inner circle. A 10 March Gallup poll found only 33 percent of Americans believed the United States was making progress in the war. Thus, Johnson approved only 10,500 additional troops for Westmoreland and in late March suspended all air attacks over North Vietnam in hopes of opening talks with Hanoi. If the 1968 Tet offensive was not an outright turning point of the war—many historians still consider it to be—Hanoi’s assault and Washington’s response brought about a shift in American policy and strategic goals. Westmoreland, hoping for a change in strategy that would expand operations into the Cambodian and Laotian sanctuaries and thus shorten the war, instead received word in late spring that he would be leaving Vietnam to become the Chief of Staff of the Army. The best the general had been able to achieve was a long and bloody stalemate. 46

Historians have seized upon the Tet offensive and mid-1968 impasse as proof of a misguided military strategy crafted by a narrow-minded general who cared only for piling up high body counts. Such arguments should be considered with care. Far from being focused only on military operations against enemy main force units, Westmoreland instead crafted a strategy that took into account the issues of pacification, civic action, land reform, and the training of South Vietnamese units. If Tet illustrated anything, it was that battlefield successes—both military and nonmilitary—did not translate automatically into larger political outcomes. Despite the wealth of manpower and resources Americans brought to South Vietnam, they could not solve Saigon’s underlying political, economic, and social problems. Moreover, Westmoreland’s military strategy could not answer the basic questions over which the war was fought. In a contest over Vietnamese national identity in the postcolonial era, the U.S. mission in South Vietnam could only keep Saigon from falling to the communists. It could not convince the people a better future lay with an ally, rather than an enemy, of the United States.

From Stalemate to Withdrawal

In June 1968, Creighton W. Abrams, a West Point classmate of Westmoreland, assumed command of MACV. Only a month before, the enemy launched a series of new attacks in South Vietnam. Dubbed “mini-Tet,” the offensive sputtered out quickly but produced 125,000 new refugees inside a society already heavily dislocated by years of fighting. Reporters were quick to highlight the differences between the outgoing and incoming commanders. But Abrams, in Andrew Birtle’s words, differed from Westmoreland “more in emphasis than in substance.” Stressing a “one war” concept that viewed the enemy as a political-military whole, the new commander confronted familiar problems. As one officer recalled, “By the time Abrams arrived on the scene, there were few options left for changing the character of the war.” 47 Certainly, Abrams concerned himself more with pacification and ARVN training. These programs rose in importance, though, not because of some new strategic concept, but rather because the American phase of the war had largely run its course. From this point forward, the war’s outcome would increasingly rest on the actions of the Vietnamese, both North and South. While U.S. officials remained committed to an independent, noncommunist Vietnam, peace had replaced military victory as Americans’ principal national objective. 48

The inauguration of Richard M. Nixon in January 1969 underscored the diminishing role of South Vietnam in American foreign policy. The new president hoped to concentrate on his larger aim of improving relations with China and the Soviet Union. Such foreign policy designs hinged on reversing the “Americanization” of the war in Southeast Asia while fortifying South Vietnam to withstand future communist aggression. As Nixon’s national security advisor Henry Kissinger recalled, the challenge was to withdraw American forces “as an expression of policy and not as a collapse.” 49 Of course, Nixon, still the Cold War warrior, remained committed to opposing the expansion of communism. Withdrawal from Vietnam thus required maintaining an image of strength during peace negotiations if the United States was to retain credibility as a world power and a deterrent to communist expansion. Nixon’s goal of “peace with honor” thus would hold crucial implications for military strategists inside Vietnam. 50

In truth, Nixon’s larger policy goals complicated the process of de-Americanizing the war, soon dubbed “Vietnamization” by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. In shifting more of the war’s burden to the South Vietnamese, the president was quietly redefining success. Realizing, in Nixon’s words, that “total military victory was no longer possible,” the new administration sought a “fair negotiated settlement that would preserve the independence of South Vietnam.” 51 (Both Nixon and Laird believed flagging domestic support was limiting their options, long a concern of senior policymakers.) Abrams would preside over an American war effort increasingly concerned with reducing casualties while arranging for U.S. troop withdrawals. Moreover, the impending American departure did little to settle unresolved questions over the most pressing threat to South Vietnam. In preparing to hand over the war, should Americans be training the ARVN to defeat conventional North Vietnamese forces or a battered yet resilient insurgency? 52

After a detailed examination of the war led by Kissinger, Nixon formulated a five-point strategy “to end the war and win the peace.” The new policy depended first on pacification, redefined as “meaningful continuing security for the Vietnamese people.” Nixon also sought diplomatic isolation of North Vietnam and placed increasing weight on negotiations in Paris. Gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces was the fourth aspect of Nixon’s strategy. As the president recalled, “Americans needed tangible evidence that we were winding down the war, and the South Vietnamese needed to be given more responsibility for their defense.” (Some ARVN officers balked at the insinuation that they hadn’t been responsible for their nation’s security.) The final element, Vietnamization, aimed at training and equipping South Vietnam’s armed forces so they could defend the country on their own. Of note, political reform in Saigon, largely a task for Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, accompanied the military side of Vietnamization. “Our whole strategy,” Nixon declared, “depended on whether this program succeeded.” 53

For Abrams, the problem now became one of synchronizing all facets of his “one war” approach. Back in August 1968, MACV had to fend off another enemy offensive, the third of the year. Without retreating from the conventional threat, Abrams turned increasing attention to pacification. Under the influence of the new CORDS chief William Colby, the GVN initiated an Accelerated Pacification Campaign at year’s end. The campaign endeavored to upgrade 1,000 contested hamlets to relatively secure ratings by the end of January 1969. To provide political space for the Saigon government, U.S. military operations increased dramatically to keep the enemy off balance, further depopulating the countryside and creating more refugees. 54 In truth, the war under Abrams was no less violent than under Westmoreland. Still, the new MACV chief hoped to cut into the NLF infrastructure by boosting the number of those who would rally to Saigon’s side under the Chieu Hoi amnesty program, reinvigorating local defense forces, and neutralizing the insurgency’s political cadre. 55 This last goal fell largely to “Phoenix,” an intelligence coordination program that targeted the NLF political organization for destruction by police and local militia forces. MACV believed the defeat of the enemy infrastructure “essential to preclude re-establishment of an operational or support base to which the VC can return.” 56

While media attention often focused on battles like the costly engagement at “Hamburger Hill” in May 1969, conventional combat operations overshadowed MACV’s larger efforts to improve and modernize South Vietnam’s armed forces. For Abrams, any successful American withdrawal was predicated on improvements in this key area of Vietnamization. In the field, U.S. advisers trained their counterparts on small-unit patrolling and coordinating artillery support with infantry and armor operations. In garrison, the Americans concentrated on improving the ARVN promotion system and building an effective maintenance program. Moreover, ARVN leadership and morale needed attention to help reduce desertion rates. So too did intelligence, logistic, and operational planning programs. Abrams also had to propose an optimal force structure and help develop an operational approach best suited to ARVN capabilities. 57

Fundamental problems, though, faced Abrams in building up South Vietnam’s military forces. After Nguyen Van Thieu, South Vietnam’s president since the September 1967 election, announced a national mobilization in mid-1968, the size of the regular army and popular and regional forces increased substantially. In two years, the total armed forces grew by 40 percent. Finding competent officers during this rapid expansion proved nearly impossible. Additionally, capable ARVN leaders, of which there were many, too often found themselves and their units still relegated to secondary roles during allied maneuvers. 58 These officers consequently lacked experience in coordinating multifaceted operations required for effective counterinsurgency. Problems within the enlisted ranks rivaled those among ARVN’s leadership. Newsweek offered a harsh appraisal of the typical South Vietnamese trooper who was “often dragooned into an army where he is poorly trained, badly paid, insufficiently indoctrinated about why he is fighting—and, for the most part, led by incompetent officers.” 59 Simply increasing the number of soldiers and supplying them with better weapons would not achieve the larger goals of Vietnamization.

Moreover, the ultimate success of Vietnamization depended on resolving perennial problems. Hanoi continued to send men and material into South Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh Trail. North Vietnamese units still found refuge in sanctuaries along the Cambodian and Laotian borders. Thus, expanding the war into Cambodia offered an opportunity to give the GVN the breathing space it needed. From his first day in office, Nixon sought to “quarantine” Cambodia. (Hanoi had taken advantage of the nominally neutral country by building base areas from which NVA units could infiltrate into South Vietnam.) To Nixon and Kissinger, improvements in ARVN readiness and pacification mattered only if South Vietnam’s borders were secure. On April 30, 1970, the president announced that U.S. troops were fighting in Cambodia. By expanding the war, Nixon was hoping to shorten it. While officials in Saigon and Washington heralded the operation’s accomplishments—Nixon stated that the “performance of the ARVN had demonstrated that Vietnamization was working”—the incursion into Cambodia left a mixed record. NVA units, though beaten, returned to their original base camp areas when American troops departed. By early June, the allies had searched only 5 percent of the 7,000 square miles of borderland despite having aimed to disrupt the enemy’s logistical bases. Additionally, the ARVN’s reliance on American firepower did not augur well for a future without U.S. air and artillery backing. 60

Worse, the Cambodian incursion set off a firestorm of political protest at home. After Ohio National Guardsmen fired into a demonstration at Kent State University on May 4, leaving four students dead, a wave of antiwar rallies swept the nation, closing nearly 450 colleges and universities. Less than four months earlier, the New York Times reported on the My Lai massacre. In March 1968, with the Tet offensive still raging, American soldiers on a search and destroy mission had summarily executed more than 300 unarmed civilians. Claims of civilian casualties prompted an informal inquiry, but army investigators covered up the story for nearly eighteen months. 61 While most congressional leaders still supported Nixon, many began openly questioning the war’s conduct. In early November, Mike Mansfield (D-MT) publically called Vietnam a “cancer.” “It’s a tragedy,” argued the Montana senator. “It’s eating out the heart of America. It’s doing us no good.” Senator George McGovern (D-SD) joined the chorus of dissenters, imploring Nixon to “stop our participation in the horrible destruction of this tiny country and its people.” The loss of support incensed the president. Nixon insisted that the pace of Vietnamization, not the level of dissent, determine U.S. troop withdrawals. Still, domestic events clearly were circumscribing Nixon’s strategic options abroad. 62

The discord at home seemed matched by discontent within the ranks of U.S. troops remaining in South Vietnam. Though contemporary views of a disintegrating army now appear overblown, clearly the strategic withdrawal was taking its toll on American soldiers. By early 1970, with the first units already departed Vietnam and more scheduled to leave, officers worried how the withdrawal was affecting their soldiers’ capacity to fight. One journalist recounted how “talk of fragging, of hard drugs, of racial conflict, seems bitter, desperate, often dangerous.” 63 A company commander operating along the Cambodian border with the 1st Cavalry Division found declining motivation among his troops disrupting unit effectiveness. “The colonel wants to make contact with the enemy and so do I,” reported the young captain, “but the men flat don’t.” 64 Few draftees wanted to be fighting in Vietnam in the first place and even fewer wanted to risk being killed in a war clearly that was winding down. In addition, Abrams increasingly had to concern himself with racial polarization inside his army. Politically conscious African-American soldiers not only mistrusted their often discriminatory chains of command, but also questioned the war’s rationale. Many blacks denounced the ideal of bringing democracy to South Vietnam when they were denied many freedoms at home. In short, the U.S. Army in Vietnam seemed to be unraveling. 65

By the end of 1970, U.S. strength dropped to some 254,800 soldiers remaining in country. Kissinger warned that unilateral withdrawals were weakening the bargaining position of the United States in Paris, but Nixon continued with the redeployments to prove Vietnamization was on track. 66 With the new year, however, came the realization that NVA logistical bases remained intact. While the Cambodian operation had denied Hanoi the use of the Sihanoukville port, the Ho Chi Minh Trail continued to serve as a major infiltration route into South Vietnam. “An invasion of the Laos Panhandle,” one ARVN officer recalled, thus “became an attractive idea.” Such an operation would “retain the initiative for the RVNAF, disrupt the flow of enemy personnel and supplies to South Vietnam, and greatly reduce the enemy’s capability to launch an offensive in 1971.” 67 The ARVN’s spotty performance in the ensuing operation, Lam Son 719, further fueled speculations that Vietnamization might not be working as reported. Though Nixon declared the campaign had “assured” the next round of U.S. troop withdrawals, Kissinger worried that Lam Son had exposed “lingering deficiencies” that raised questions over South Vietnam’s ability to bear the full burden of the ongoing war. 68

If Kissinger agonized over the need to balance negotiations with troop withdrawals and offensive operations to keep the enemy off balance, he was not alone. Inside Hanoi’s Politburo, Le Duan equally pondered strategic alternatives in the aftermath of Lam Son 719. Though only sixteen U.S. maneuver battalions remained in South Vietnam by early 1972, on all fronts the war appeared deadlocked. Le Duan hoped a new invasion would “defeat the American ‘Vietnamization’ policy, gain a decisive victory in 1972, and force the U.S. imperialists to negotiate an end to the war from a position of defeat.” 69 Abrams remained unclear regarding enemy intentions. Was a large-scale invasion an act of desperation, as Nixon believed, or a way to gain leverage in negotiations by controlling South Vietnamese territory? North Vietnamese strategists certainly were taking risks but not out of desperation. The 1972 Nguyen-Hue campaign aimed for a collapse of South Vietnam’s armed forces, Thieu’s ouster, and the formation of a coalition government. Failing these ambitious goals, Le Duan envisioned the struggle continuing against a weakened ARVN. In either case, the Politburo believed its “actions would totally change the character of the war in South Vietnam.” 70

The subsequent “Easter Offensive,” begun on March 30, 1972, unleashed three separate NVA thrusts into South Vietnam. In some areas, the ARVN fought bravely; in others, soldiers broke and ran. Abrams responded by throwing B-52 bombers into the battle as Nixon ordered resumption of bombing in the North and the mining of Haiphong harbor. Gradually, yet perceptibly, the offensive’s momentum began to slow. Although North Vietnam’s spring offensive had ended with no dramatic battlefield victory, it had met its goal of changing the character of the war. 71 U.S. officials proclaimed Vietnamization a final success given that the ARVN had successfully blunted the enemy’s assault. Overwhelming U.S. air support, however, quite literally saved many units from being overrun and, more intangibly, helped sustain morale during hard months of fighting. Equally important, North Vietnamese leaders made several errors during the campaign. The separate offensives into South Vietnam dissipated combat strength while placing overwhelming strain on logistical support capabilities. Moreover, tactical commanders lacked experience in employing tanks and squandered infantry units in suicidal assaults. 72

By the end of June, only 49,000 U.S. troops remained in South Vietnam. Like his predecessor, Abrams was pulled to become the army’s chief of staff before the guns had fallen silent. Throughout the summer and fall, stalemated discussions in Paris mirrored the military standoff inside South Vietnam. In October, Kissinger reported to Nixon a breakthrough with the North Vietnamese delegation and announced an impending cease-fire. President Thieu fumed that Kissinger had conceded too much, allowing NVA units to remain in South Vietnam and refused to sign any agreement. The resulting diplomatic impasse, fueled by Thieu’s defiance and Hanoi’s intransigence, infuriated Nixon. By December, the president had reached his limits and ordered a massive air campaign against North Vietnam to break the deadlock. Nixon intended the bombing assault, codenamed Linebacker II, to induce both Hanoi and Saigon to return to the negotiating table. On December 26, the Politburo agreed to resume talks while Nixon pressed Thieu to support the armistice. The final settlement changed little from the principles outlined in October. One month later, on January 27, 1973, the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government signed the Paris Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam. 73

Conclusions

In large sense, Nixon’s use of B-52 bombers during Linebacker II illustrated the limits of American military power in Vietnam. The press reacted strongly, referring to the bombing of urban targets in North Vietnam as “war by tantrum” and an act of “senseless terror.” 74 But by late 1972, B-52s were the only tools left in Nixon’s arsenal. Despite years of effort and sacrifice, the best the Americans could achieve was a stalemate only temporarily broken by strategic bombing. Many senior military officers, perhaps unsurprisingly, would point to Linebacker II as proof of a mismanaged war. They argued that if only civilian policymakers had been less restrictive in setting unnecessary boundaries, those in uniform could have won much earlier and at much less cost. Such arguments, however, tended to discount the larger political concerns of presidents and their advisers hoping to limit a war that had become the centerpiece of American foreign policy and one that had divided the nation. 75

Others advanced a different “if only” argument regarding U.S. military strategy for Vietnam. They posited that upon taking command of MACV, Abrams, deviating almost immediately from Westmoreland’s conventional methods, had changed the American approach to, and thus nature of, the war. This “better war” thesis found acceptance among many officers in whom a conviction endured that a better application of strategy could have yielded better political results. Yet senior American commanders, even before Westmoreland’s tenure at MACV, tended to see the war as a comprehensive whole and devised their strategy accordingly. Despite frequent heavy-handedness in applying military power inside South Vietnam, almost all officers recognized that the war ultimately was a contest for political power.

Comprehending the complexities of strategy and effectively implementing it, however, were not one and the same. Officers serving in Vietnam quickly found that strategy included much more than simply drafting a plan of political-military action. The complexity of the threat, both political and military, confounded U.S. analysts and staff officers. Westmoreland understood the important role played by southern insurgent forces but argued he could not stamp out these irregular “termites” without substantially eliminating the enemy’s main force units. Even ascertaining enemy motives proved difficult. Not long after Abrams took command, MACV still faced a “real problem, following the Tet offensive, trying to figure out” the enemy’s overall military strategy. 76

Perhaps most importantly, senior U.S. policymakers were asking too much of their military strategists. In the end, the war was a struggle between and among Vietnamese. For the United States, the foundation on which American forces waged a struggle—one that involved both construction of an effective host government and destruction of a committed communist-nationalist enemy—proved too fragile. Officers like Westmoreland and Abrams found that nation-building in a time of war was one of the most difficult tasks to ask of a military force. Yet American faith in the power to reconstruct, if not create, a South Vietnamese political community led to policies that did not address a fundamental issue—the internal contest to define and come to a consensus on Vietnamese nationalism and identity in the modern age.

More than any other conflict during the Cold War era, Vietnam exposed the limits of American military power overseas. It was a reality that many U.S. citizens found, and continue to find, discomforting. Yet if a perspective is to be gained from the long American experience in Southeast Asia, it lies here. Not all problems can be solved by military force, even when that force is combined with political, economic, and social efforts. The capacity of Americans to reshape new political and social communities may not, in fact, be limitless. Writing of his own experiences in the Korean War, Matthew Ridgway offered an important conclusion while the war in Vietnam was still raging. In setting foreign policy objectives, the general advised that policymakers look “to define them with care and to make sure they lie within the range of our vital national interests and that their accomplishment is within our capabilities.” 77 For those seeking to understand the disappointments of American military strategy during the Vietnam War, Ridgway’s counsel seems a useful starting point.

Discussion of the Literature

The historiography on the American experience in Vietnam remains a contentious topic. For a starting point, the best surveys are George Herring’s America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950– 1975, 4th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002) , which is more a diplomatic and political history, and Mark Atwood Lawrence’s The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) , which places the war in an international perspective. A solid textbook is George Moss , Vietnam: An American Ordeal , 6th edition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2009). An excellent collection of essays can be found in both David Anderson’s The Columbia History of the Vietnam War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011 ) and Jayne Werner and Luu Doan Huhnh , The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997).

The escalation of the war under Johnson is well covered. Among the most important works are Fredrik Logevall , Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999 ), and Lloyd C. Gardner , Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995) . Larry Berman has two very good works on LBJ: Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982 ), and Larry Berman , Lyndon Johnson’s War: The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). Brian VanDeMark’s Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) is also useful. Robert Dallek , Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) , provides a balanced overview of the president’s struggles with the war.

The topic of U.S. military strategy is hotly debated. Gregory A. Daddis , Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing American Strategy in the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) , offers a reinterpretation of those works in suggesting Americans were blind to the realities of the war. Samples of these latter works include: Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. , The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) ; Harry G. Summers Jr. , On Strategy: A Critical Appraisal of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1982) ; and Jeffrey Record , The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998). More persuasive is Andrew J. Birtle , U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942–1976 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2006). Though Abrams left behind no written work on the war, Lewis Sorley , a staunch admirer of the general, provides insights in Vietnam Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes, 1968–1972 (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2004) . Mark Clodfelter takes on the air war in The Limits of Airpower: The American Bombing of North Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 1989). Thomas L. Ahern Jr. looks at the CIA in Vietnam Declassified: The CIA and Counterinsurgency (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010). Finally, an often overlooked yet important work on senior military leaders is Robert Buzzanco , Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

On the war’s final years, see Jeffrey Kimball , Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998) ; Ronald H. Spector , After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 1993) ; and James H. Willbanks , Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004) . Lewis Sorley’s A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999) takes an overly sympathetic view of the Abrams’s years.

For memoirs from senior leaders, students should consult William Colby with James McCargar , Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America’s Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989) ; Lyndon Baines Johnson , The Vantage Point: Perspectives on the Presidency, 1963–1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971) ; Henry Kissinger , Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America’s Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003) ; Robert W Komer , Bureaucracy at War: U.S. Performance in the Vietnam Conflict (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1986) ; Robert S. McNamara , In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 1995) ; Richard Nixon , RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978) ; Bruce, Palmer Jr. , The 25-Year War: America’s Military Role in Vietnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984) ; and William C. Westmoreland , A Soldier Reports (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976). Among the best memoirs from junior officers and soldiers are: Philip Caputo , A Rumor of War (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977) ; David Donovan , Once a Warrior King (New York: Ballantine, 1986) ; Stuart A. Herrington , Stalking the Vietcong: Inside Operation Phoenix: A Personal Account (Navato, CA: Presidio, 2004) ; and Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway . We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). Less a memoir than an excellent collective biography of the enlisted soldier serving in Vietnam is Christian G. Appy , Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993)

Journalists’ accounts were important in covering the American experience and in setting a foundation for how the war has been outlined in popular memory. Among the most indispensable of this genre are David Halberstam , The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1969) ; David Halberstam , The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964, 1988) ; Michael Herr , Dispatches (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968) ; Don Oberdorfer , Tet! (New York: Doubleday, 1971) ; and Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988). Also useful is Peter Braestrup , Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1977).

The South Vietnamese perspective often gets lost in American-centric works on the war but should not be disregarded. Mark P. Bradley’s Vietnam at War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) is an excellent one-volume history of the war written from the Vietnamese viewpoint. Both Andrew Wiest , Vietnam’s Forgotten Army Vietnam’s Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN (New York: New York University Press, 2008 ) and Robert K. Brigham , ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006) , make an important contribution for understanding the U.S. Army’s most important allies. Three provincial studies also delve into the war inside South Vietnam’s villages: Eric M. Bergerud , The Dynamics of Defeat: The Vietnam War in Hau Nghia Province (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991) ; Jeffrey Race , War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) ; and James Walker Trullinger Jr. , Village at War: An Account of Revolution in Vietnam (New York: Longman, 1980). For an argument on the cultural divide between allies, see Frances FitzGerald , Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972).

If the South Vietnamese perspective often is overlooked, the North Vietnamese also tends to get short shrift in American works. Relying on new research, the best among this group are Pierre Asselin , Hanoi’s’ Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) ; Lien-Hang T. Nguyen , Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012) ; Ang Cheng Guan , The Vietnam War from the Other Side: The Vietnamese Communists’ Perspective (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002 ) and Ending the Vietnam War: The Vietnamese Communists’ Perspective (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954–1975 , translated by Merle L. Pribbenow (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002) ; William J. Duiker , The Communist Road to Power , 2d ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996) ; and Warren Wilkins , Grab Their Belts to Fight Them: The Viet Cong’s Big Unit War against the U.S., 1965–1966 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011).

Finally, students should not overlook the value of novels in understanding the war from the soldiers’ viewpoint. Among the best are Bao Ninh , The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam (New York: Riverhead, 1996) ; Josiah Bunting , The Lionheads (New York: George Braziller, 1972) ; Karl Marlantes , Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2010) ; Tim O’Brien , The Things They Carried (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990) ; and Robert Roth , Sand in the Wind (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973).

Primary Sources

Among the best documentary collections are Michael H. Hunt , A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010 ), and Mark Atwood Lawrence , The Vietnam War: An International History in Documents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Also useful is Robert McMahon and Thomas Paterson , Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War: Documents and Essays (Boston: Wadsworth, 2007). For encyclopedias on the war, see Spencer C. Tucker , ed., The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social & Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001 ), and Stanley I. Kutler , Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War , 2d ed. (New York: Scribner, 2005).

Researchers should also consult two still useful collections of documents: The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decision making on Vietnam, ed. Mike Gravel , 5 vols. (Boston: Beacon, 1971–1972), and William Conrad Gibbons , The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships , 4 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1986–1995). The U.S. Department of State has collected a wonderful array of documents in the Foreign Relations of the United States ( FRUS ) series. These resources can be found online at http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments .

For researchers delving into primary sources, the best place to begin is the Virtual Vietnam Archive run by Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. This online archive houses more than four million pages of materials and is located at http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/ . The physical archive has much more additional material for researchers. For higher level strategic insights, the presidential libraries in Boston, Massachusetts (Kennedy), Austin, Texas (Johnson), and Yorba Linda, California (Nixon) have important archival holdings. Those seeking insights into the U.S. Army will find excellent resources at the U.S. Army Military History Institute in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Army Center of Military History at Fort McNair, Washington, DC. The National Archives in College Park, Maryland, offers a vast amount of resources as well. Finally, for those wishing to focus on cultural issues within the region, researchers may wish to consult the John M. Echols Collection on Southeast Asia at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Researcher information can be found at http://asia.library.cornell.edu/ac/Echols/index .

The Vietnam War (1955-1975) essay

The Vietnam War is considered to be one of the most important events in the history of the United States. This event influenced the lives of millions of Americans because many citizens of the United States were enrolled in the army. According to statistical data, “Hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers were wounded and traumatized, and tens of thousands lost their lives” (Friedrichs 131). The war began in 1955 and ended in 1975. This historical period was the era of the Cold War, which was characterized by a lot of tension between the United States and Soviet Union. The Vietnam War took place in Vietnam, and was extended in Laos and Cambodia.

The Vietnam War is also known as Vietnam Conflict and Second Indochina War. It was a prolonged struggle between nationalists aimed at unifying the territories of South and North Vietnam under a communist government and the United States with the South Vietnamese assistance aimed at preventing the spread of communism (Friedrichs 131). North Vietnam was backed by the People’s Republic of China, while South Vietnam was backed by the United States and defiant communist allies. American involvement in the Vietnam War can be explained as a way to prevent a communist takeover not only of South Vietnam, but also other countries. In other words, the U.S. strategy was aimed at preventing the further spread of communism across the world (Friedrichs 131). The leaders of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong wanted to reunify Vietnam under communist government. As a result, they considered the military conflict as an example of the colonial war, which was fought initially against France, then against the United States as France was backed by the U.S.A. and, finally, against South Vietnam, which was the U.S. puppet state (Bostdorff & Goldzwig 520). According to Morena Groll, “it was the longest military conflict, which on top of everything ended in defeat for the Americans”(2). The United States was engaged in a war that many military and political experts analyzed as unnecessary war because of having no way to win. The U.S. political leaders lost the national support for the war because the U.S. citizens were against the war actions in Vietnam. Since the end of the Vietnam War, this event has become a benchmark for the U.S. leaders signifying what they should not do in all future U.S. foreign conflicts. According to researchers, “wartime disagreements about foreign policy persisted in the postwar period as Americans debated the proper ‘lessons’ of the war”(Hagopian 23).

Thesis statement: Although the Vietnam War caused by the U.S. desire to stop the spread of communism had negative consequences on Americans, including social, economic and political consequences, this event helped to shape Modern World History.

The Vietnam War: background information

The Vietnam War has been widely discussed in the media and academic sources. In order to assess the role of the Vietnam War in shaping the Modern World History, it is necessary to refer to the causes, consequences and solutions to the military conflict. Special attention should be paid to the U.S. President’s policy. According to Denise M. Bostdorff and Steven Goldzwig, “Kennedy’s rhetoric on Vietnam serves as an exemplar of how presidents balance idealistic arguments, which apply principles of genus to public problem-solving, and pragmatic arguments, which emphasize the efficacy or practicality of politics” (515). The idealistic appeals of President Kennedy provided legitimate support to his Vietnam policy, representing him as a “principled leader” (Bostdorff & Goldzwig 515). In other words, the U.S. President’s appeals helped him to avoid criticism of his foreign policy and explain the causes of slow progress.

The major causes of the war

North Vietnam was under the communist government and South Vietnam wasn’t. Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the North Vietnam, wanted to spread communism in the whole Vietnam, uniting North Vietnam and South Vietnam. The leaders of the South Vietnam opposed the spread of communism. The United States took the side of South Vietnam, bringing the war in a different level (Hagopian 73). Thus, the major causes of the Vietnam War include three causes:

To stop the spread of communism in Vietnam;
As the French soldiers pulled out of war for a number of reasons, the U.S. was ready to take their place in the military conflict;
The U.S. foreign policy was based on providing support to friend countries.

There were several players in the Vietnam War: South Vietnam, North Vietnam, the USA, South Korea, People’s Republic of China, Russia.

The major consequences of the war

The Vietnam War had an enormous impact on the life of Americans, including various spheres of public and private life. The consequences of the military conflict contributed to considerable changes in the U.S. foreign policy. Although the United States is considered to be the world’s greatest superpower, there are some negative effects of the U.S. President’s decision regarding the solutions to the Vietnam conflict. According to researchers, the United States “had entered Vietnam as a powerful, united nation certain of its cause and of victory” (Wiest 83). The defeat in the Vietnam War made millions of Americans reconsider and reassess the established beliefs and values. Besides the above mentioned facts, the country was left battered and depressed because of the uncertainty in the future policy, especially in the face of the complex challenges caused by the Cold War (Wiest 83).

Moreover, the Vietnam War shaped the relations between the role of the political opinion of the public and the politics that was influenced by the media functioning during the military conflict in Vietnam. The legacy of the Vietnam War can be assessed by means of the statistical data, which affected the public opinion regarding the war. According to statistical data, “during the war in Vietnam the French lost some 76,000 dead and 65,000 wounded – while their allies lost 19,000 dead and 13,000 wounded, while American forces lost some 58,000 dead and over 300,000 wounded” (Wiest 83). The U.S. foreign policy was criticized during the war.

In addition, many historians, politicians and journalists indicted the established government policy, providing radically different opinions regarding the major causes of war and its consequences. The most popular journalists and historians were Bernard Fall, Robert Shaplen, John Lewis, George McT. Kahin and others. They provided severe criticism of the war’s efficiency (Marolda 767). The American movement against the Vietnam War promoted anti-war ideas and encouraged Americans to protest against American involvement in this military conflict. This movement influenced the decisions of Johnson’s administration, leading to the policy reversal in 1968. According to researchers, “during the Nixon administration, it hastened the U.S. troops withdrawals, continued to restrain the war, fed the deterioration in the U.S. troop morale and discipline” (Marolda 758).

The major solutions to the war

The major solutions to the war are based on the fact that the Vietnam War was the most significant military conflict of the 20-th century. Although the war in Vietnam was rather small as it involved limited action of the United States, the “9 years of official American involvement in the war over 2 million Vietnamese and 58, 219 Americans lost their lives” (Wiest 5).

In addition, the key military operations during the war were influenced by the relationships between the military and the civilians. Vietnam was the center of Cold War strategy. Different operations conducted during the Vietnam War were related to the tactics of the limited war. This strategy was criticized by the leaders of civilian society. There were limits set on the spread of the military conflict in Vietnam. Although the senior members of the U.S. military forces recommended expanding the scope of the military conflict, the U.S. presidents and their administrations opposed the expansion of freedom of action. Both the U.S. President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson used democratic solutions to the war (Hagopian 24).

The importance of the event in Modern World History

The Vietnam War plays an important role in Modern World History. This event has changed the minds of millions of people regarding the perception of war and the role of the U.S. involvement in the military conflict. According to researchers, “the Vietnam War and its perception were unprecedented in their entire dimension,” because of the considerable social and political changes that occurred during the military conflict (Groll 2). More specifically, there were changes in the media perception due to the emergence of television as an effective tool of political thought and political socialization. During this period, television expanded and turned into the most influential source of information for all people. Television offered massive opportunities for the U.S. leaders, including the war coverage and the public perception. The Canadian philosopher of communication theory, Marshall McLuhan, states that “television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America – not on the battlefields of Vietnam”(qtd. in Groll 2).

In fact, the Vietnam War is considered to be one of the most disliked wars in the history of United States. According to researchers, “the cost of this war was the death of 60 thousands Americans and 2 to 4 million Vietnamese deaths” (Rahman & Marjan 23). The considerable changes in the development of journalism during the period of Vietnam War led to the changed public perception of the war. According to researchers, “the story of Vietnam and how pictures of bloody fights, American casualties, and killed Vietnamese civilians turned around American public opinion and, eventually, led to the withdrawal of American troops, has become a classic” (Rahman & Marjan 23). The majority of reporters provided cynical representation of the war. As a result, the mass media produced confusion among the U.S. citizens because people began to express political distrust to the government (Rahman & Marjan 24).

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The Cold War Case Study: Vietnam (Essay question) Stages in the war: • 1957-1965 Struggle in Vietnam between the South Vietnamese army and communist-trained rebels (also known as the Viet Cong) ... Exemplars - CAPS' Grade 12 that is on the DBE website. This document gives a step by step approach on how to undertake research.
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The Vietnam War was fought between the pro-Communist North Vietnamese and the anti-Communist South Vietnamese. The United States entered the war to support South Vietnam in order to stop the spread of communism and the threat of the communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh. At the time the United States decided to enter the war, Ho Chi Minh had ...
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The Vietnam War (1955-1975) essay
This event influenced the lives of millions of Americans because many citizens of the United States were enrolled in the army. According to statistical data, "Hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers were wounded and traumatized, and tens of thousands lost their lives" (Friedrichs 131). The war began in 1955 and ended in 1975.

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Article contents

Introduction

Devising Strategy for a New Kind of War

From Escalation to Stalemate

From Stalemate to Withdrawal

Conclusions

Discussion of the Literature

Primary Sources

Further Reading

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The Vietnam War (1955-1975) essay

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