The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War

David Anderson

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780231507387
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Vietnam War

More than a quarter of a century after the last Marine Corps Huey left the American embassy in Saigon, the lessons and legacies of the most divisive war in twentieth-century American history are as hotly debated as ever. Why did successive administrations choose little-known Vietnam as the "test case" of American commitment in the fight against communism? Why were the "best and brightest" apparently blind to the illegitimacy of the state of South Vietnam? Would Kennedy have pulled out had he lived? And what lessons regarding American foreign policy emerged from the war?

The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War helps readers understand this tragic and complex conflict. The book contains both interpretive information and a wealth of facts in easy-to-find form. Part I provides a lucid narrative overview of contested issues and interpretations in Vietnam scholarship. Part II is a mini-encyclopedia with descriptions and analysis of individuals, events, groups, and military operations. Arranged alphabetically, this section enables readers to look up isolated facts and specialized terms. Part III is a chronology of key events. Part IV is an annotated guide to resources, including films, documentaries, CD-ROMs, and reliable Web sites. Part V contains excerpts from historical documents and statistical data.

PART I

Historical Narrative

Chapter 1

STUDYING THE VIETNAM WAR

To study the Vietnam War one must be prepared to struggle with ambiguity. The war was and continues to be divisive and confusing because both its general outlines and its specific details have been the subject of so much intense debate. There are even arguments over what the war should be called—the Vietnam War, the Indochina War, the American War in Vietnam, and other variations. The name “Vietnam War” is the term most Americans use to denote the conflict that involved the United States in Indochina from about 1950 to 1975. Like the name, the dates are approximate. The French War in Indochina, or the First Indochina War as it is also called, began at the end of World War II and continued until a cease-fire was arranged at the Geneva Conference of 1954. The Second Indochina War, or what the Vietnamese term the American War, began around 1960 and continued until the last American civil and military officials departed Saigon in April 1975. Direct U.S. involvement in the Indochina Wars stretched from the middle of the French War until the evacuation of Americans from Saigon in 1975. To understand fully American involvement over that period, however, it is also necessary to consider the history of Vietnam and the United States before 1950 and after 1975. In addition, the Vietnam War has to be understood as a Southeast Asian conflict that spread beyond the borders of Vietnam.

For Americans the Vietnam War was long, costly, and divisive. It was even longer and more costly for the Vietnamese, but that fact made the war only more controversial for Americans. As American casualties mounted and ultimately totaled over 58,000 killed or missing, citizens went beyond simply asking why the United States was in Vietnam to demanding some justification for such sacrifices. As the level of U.S. destruction of the Vietnamese also grew into the hundreds of thousands, some Americans questioned what such ruthlessness revealed about their country’s values. World War II had been long and destructive but had united Americans. In sharp contrast, the Vietnam War polarized Americans. Some citizens accepted their losses and the violence of the war as necessary and justified. Others felt that their own grievous losses were without purpose and that the American military intervention in Vietnam was excessive and unjust. These differing perceptions at the time, and ever since, were filtered through ideological and cultural lenses. Hence the events took on different appearances and different meanings, creating the ambiguity that still clouds the understanding of the Vietnam War.

The nature of American historical analysis of the war has changed over time, and the changes reveal the challenges inherent in explaining the Vietnam experience. Prior to the 1960s few American scholars had written about Vietnam. During the war most American scholarly studies were critical of U.S. involvement. Such disagreement with official U.S. policy reversed the pattern of historical works during World War II and the early Cold War. In the so-called orthodox histories of those previous wars, scholars defended or sought to justify U.S. actions. It was not until later that so-called revisionists began to fault U.S. policy in various ways. During the Vietnam War a variety of criticisms appeared as the size of the U.S. commitment grew. Thus the initial, conventional interpretations were negative assessments and included, in particular, the quagmire theory that American leaders blundered into Vietnam or the stalemate theory that leaders lacked the political courage to end what they knew was a losing venture. The most frequently encountered orthodox critique was a liberal-realist interpretation that policymakers had misapplied to Vietnam the containment strategy intended to counter Soviet power in Europe. More extreme than these orthodox complaints was a radical analysis that attacked the American military campaign as imperialist. After the war ended, a revisionist, or “win,” school appeared. Its proponents argued that American intervention in Vietnam was merited and that the United States could have won the war if it had used more military force. This contention sparked a number of postrevisionist rebuttals, which were generally reaffirmations (often with more evidence available) of one of the earlier orthodox critiques.

Regardless of whether they viewed the war as just or unjust, the overwhelming majority of Americans polled in various surveys in the years after the war labeled it a mistake. Without question, this negative assessment was an acknowledgment that the United States had lost the war. Despite enormous effort and sacrifice, the U.S. military had not been able to preserve the independence of South Vietnam and sustain it as a noncommunist bastion against Asian communism, which had been the stated objectives of U.S. policy. While not surprising that Americans understood that mistakes and failures had occurred, the same opinion polls revealed that most respondents could not specifically identify the errors. They did not know whether the United States had done too much or too little. They could not identify specific policies, and, in fact, many could not correctly identify the opposing sides or which side the United States supported. In one 1989 sampling of entering college students, almost one-fourth thought that the opposing sides were North and South Korea.

There is more of an imperative to learning about the Vietnam War than just the often repeated adage that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. The memory of Vietnam is painful for Americans and not one that the society wishes to recall in its entirety, if even at all. A number of writers have characterized the Vietnam experience as a wound, both physical and psychological, on American society. There are parallel legacies of America in Vietnam and Vietnam in America, and it is the latter, the wound within, that tore at the United States then and continues to haunt the national psyche. During the war the wound was open and bleeding as Americans turned on each other in acrimonious debate. The tension of the era went beyond the war itself and included generational, racial, and ideological confrontations.

When the fighting ended and the U.S. troops left Vietnam, the trauma began to recede. There was, in fact, an unwillingness throughout the 1970s to examine carefully what Vietnam had done to America. The wound scabbed over but did not heal. Eventually, in the 1980s, often through the efforts of anguished veterans who needed to resolve their own personal torment, the Vietnam War began to be reexamined. Construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (“The Wall”) in Washington, D.C., poetry and fiction by veterans, movies, memoirs, and historical research started to dress the wound. This process continued into the 1990s, as more information about what had been secret wartime decision making became known. With more knowledge and more open dialogue, some understanding began to develop about how a great nation like the United States could go so wrong. At the same time, however, the process was more like picking at the scab rather than healing the wound. Cynicism and distrust of leaders still abounded. Old wartime polarities continued to echo in the debates. In 1991 President George H. W. Bush led the United States into war against Iraq with broad popular support. Although Bush proclaimed that the Gulf War had finally put the ghost of Vietnam to rest, his own eagerness to end the war quickly and to avoid a protracted and costly engagement demonstrated how strong the memory of Vietnam remained.

As the Gulf War recalled old images of Vietnam, the Cold War that had provided much of the rationale for initial U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia was coming to an end. The Soviet Union and its ruling Communist Party Central Committee formally dissolved in 1991. This historic turn of events, like Bush’s bravura pronouncements about the Gulf War, seemed to have made Vietnam less relevant to the present. In fact, the opposite has been the case. Dissent over the Vietnam War had so disrupted the fiber of American life that the public was skeptical of the national leadership’s declarations of purpose and calls for sacrifice. Without the Soviet threat and with bitter memories of Vietnam still lingering, the role of the United States, as the world’s lone superpower, was difficult to define in genocidal regional conflicts in the Balkans and in Africa during the 1990s.

As with any major historical event, the Vietnam War does not provide a precise blueprint for present and future actions. Iraq in 1991 or Serbia in 1995 was not Vietnam in 1965 anymore than Vietnam in 1965 was Czechoslovakia in 1938 or Korea in 1950. The meaningful application of history in contemporary life requires a disciplined study of the past with the twin goals of a faithful rendering of past events and a judicious use of analytical principles that transcend time and place. Were there any redeeming features of the Vietnam War for the United States? What do Americans need to understand about the war from Vietnam’s perspective? What did the Vietnam War reveal about American culture, history, and values, and what effect did the war have on them? Given its especially contentious nature, the Vietnam War must be approached with extreme caution before making sweeping claims of its relevance or irrelevance today. Care is in order, but avoidance of the study of the war is not.

Chapter 2

VIETNAM: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

For most Americans the word “Vietnam” refers to a war, but Vietnam was a country with a distinctive history long before it was a war. A Chinese history from 208 B.C. provided the first recorded reference to a non-Chinese people living to the south, in a kingdom called Nam Viet (or Nan Yue in Chinese). From that date two thousand years of recorded history led up to the tumultuous wars in twentieth-century Vietnam.

ROOTS OF THE VIETNAMESE CULTURE AND STATE

Two historical characteristics of the Vietnamese people emerged from their past. One was a sense of separate ethnic identity and resistance to outside domination derived from a millennium of resistance to control by their powerful Chinese neighbors. The other was a repeated inability to achieve lasting unity among themselves. These two powerful patterns of struggle against external threat and for internal cohesion were clearly visible throughout Vietnam’s history into and including the wars with the French and Americans in the second half of the twentieth century. The Vietnamese have fought many times for home rule and over who will rule at home.

WHAT ARE THE CULTURAL ROOTS OF THE VIETNAMESE NATION?

In 111 B.C. China’s powerful Han dynasty extended political control over the Vietnamese people, then centered in the Red River Delta. Although China’s ability to manage its southern province ebbed and flowed over the centuries, it was not until a decisive naval engagement in A.D. 938 that the Vietnamese fully regained political independence. Although Vietnam’s leaders had always preserved considerable political autonomy from China, Vietnamese culture became heavily sinicized by the influence of the vigorous Han and Tang dynasties. Chinese language, arts, and Confucian philosophy shaped Vietnam’s culture. In fact, the Vietnamese ability to adopt China’s bureaucratic system of administration may have been what helped the always recalcitrant province to ultimately grow strong enough to break China’s grasp. In some ways, Vietnam became a defiant replica of China—a smaller version of China’s large dragon.

The end of Chinese authority did not mean that a unified Vietnamese state came into being, and for the next thousand years the Vietnamese faced the challenge of establishing a stable political structure in their own country. Power in Vietnam was hereditary, and the right to rule was contested by various families. After about a century of internal conflict following the victory over the Chinese, the Ly dynasty emerged to establish a stable central government that administered the country in the Chinese style through gentry officials chosen by examinations on the Chinese classics. In the thirteenth century, owing to the lack of a male heir, the Ly gave way to the Tran family in a peaceful transition, and internal order continued under the gentry (or what Westerners later called “mandarin”) system. This stability was undermined, however, by continued external threats to Vietnam.

In several major military engagements, the Vietnamese repulsed Mongol forces from the north in the 1280s, and then in the fourteenth century they fought a series of successful campaigns against invaders from Champa, the area that is now central Vietnam. The military leader of the victory over the Chams then overthrew the Tran dynasty and set off turmoil in Vietnam that tempted the strong Ming dynasty of China once again to attempt to reclaim the former Chinese province. In 1428, however, Le Loi, a great hero of Vietnamese history and founder of the Le dynasty, forced China to recognize Vietnam’s autonomy.

With the northern border secure, the Le dynasty began what is known as the March to the South in 1471. Initially aimed at removing the remaining vestiges of threat from Champa, this southern expansion continued for three hundred years until the Vietnamese claimed all the territory along the Southeast Asian coast down to the tip of the Cau Mau Peninsula. This geographic expansion brought with it a breakdown of the Le’s central authority and led to a regional division of power among three rival families. A number of bloody wars finally eliminated the Mac family and brought a stalemate between the Trinh and Nguyen families. The line of demarcation between their areas of control was a wall built by the Nguyen. Located north of Hue, the wall was very near the line drawn at the Geneva Conference in 1954 to divide North and South Vietnam.

HOW HAVE THE CONCEPTS OF THE NATION, THE REGION, AND THE VILLAGE SHAPED VIETNAMESE HISTORY?

As rival families fought to consolidate power and form a unified Vietnamese nation, strong forces of regionalism and rebellion against the central authority persisted. The geography of Vietnam was a major obstacle to national unity. The area populated by the Vietnamese consisted of a strip of fertile land hugging the coast of the South China Sea, from the agriculturally rich Red River Delta in the north to the similarly productive Mekong River Delta in the south. Mountains to the west confined the population to the coast, and ridges from this mountain range extended to the shore, effectively isolating the country’s disparate regions. Distance and topography hampered central authority and gave protection to rebels.

In these settlements, scattered along Vietnam’s thousand-mile length and economically based on patty rice cultivation, the local village, not the courts of emperors or powerful families, became the locus of authority. The villagers shared a common Confucian culture but retained their autonomy over their own affairs in a deeply rooted pattern of family, property, and tradition. This fragmentati...