The Vietnam War (fl. 1964-1973) was fought by the US to prevent the communist overthrow of its banana republican government in Saigon, South Vietnam. Years of war led nowhere. The US pulled out in 1973. Saigon fell in 1975.
By the numbers:
- body count: 1.6 to 4.0 million, about half of them civilians.
- bombs: 7 million tons, more than in all of the Second World War.
- craters left: 20 million.
It began with a lie. In August 1964, Defence Secretary Robert McNamara said:
“While on routine patrol in international waters, the US destroyer Maddox underwent an unprovoked attack [by North Vietnamese torpedo boats].”
Completely made up. But the truth would not come out till seven years later when the New York Times got a copy of the “Pentagon Papers”, the Pentagon’s secret history of the war. In the meantime, all but two senators voted for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving the president a free hand to make war in Vietnam. The US already had 16,000 military “advisers” there.
The Vietcong were the communist guerrillas of South Vietnam. They were everywhere and nowhere. Short of genocide, you could not bomb them to pieces. Jonathan Schell in 1971 in the New Yorker:
“Some of the [US] officers began to read the works of Mao Tse-tung, in which it is said that guerrillas live among the people the way fish live in the sea, so a new strategy was developed in the hope of catching the fish by drying up the sea – which is to say, by tearing the entire Vietnamese society to pieces and then putting it together again according to some plan that was being worked out in the think tanks in Washington.”
Important words and phases:
- domino theory – the idea that if South Vietnam fell to the communists, so would all the other countries of South East Asia, one by one. In public the US government said it cared about the freedom of Asians. In private it cared about its military bases in the region and South East Asia’s oil, rubber, tin and rice that the US and Japan wanted.
- gook – racial slur used by US servicemen to dehumanize the Vietnamese.
- search and destroy mission – burning houses, shooting men of military age, and sending everyone else to a refugee camp. Not everyone was so fortunate:
- My Lai – where 450 to 500 men, women, and children were marched to a ditch and gunned down by the US Army. There were likely dozens of other such massacres.
- “No Vietcong ever called me nigger” – why Muhammad Ali refused to fight.
- “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” – said by protesters to President Johnson. There were huge anti-war protests.
- “winning hearts and minds” – how to win a guerrilla war. The opposite of what the US did (see above).
Who came out against the war when:
- 1962: Noam Chomsky
- 1963: Bertrand Russell
- 1964: Joan Baez
- 1965: SNCC, SDS, Stokely Carmichael, Coretta Scott King, Dr Spock
- 1966: Muhammad Ali
- 1967: Martin Luther King, Jr, Harry Belafonte, Robert Kennedy
- 1968: Eartha Kitt, Daniel Berrigan, Howard Zinn, Walter Cronkite (CBS News).
– Abagond, 2017.
Sources: mainly “A People’s History of the United States” (2003) by Howard Zinn; “Observing the Nixon Years” (1989) by Jonathan Schell.
See also:
- Pentagon Papers
- The Time of Illusion – Jonathan Schell’s excellent take on the war in 1975
- guerrilla warfare
- banana republic
- Philippine-American War
- against:
- Mao
- New York Times
- How the war is dealt with by:
- Watergate
- The three pillars of US racism
So painful and yet so painfully true.
PS: The dead are closer to 8-9 million.
There are 3 million Vietnamese in the missing category alone.
And they have been missing for more than 40 years now.
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Sorry man, tryna get pictures to show is hard, it’s a lottery, sometimes they show, sometimes they dont
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https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-E0sgtQ3O6g0/V8nIevCfiTI/AAAAAAAAJcA/evrDFpbwYOYeYeAyI9jNl3G36-FFBbFPwCJoC/w530-h353-p-rw/16%2B-%2B1
One of the things that’s interesting about Vietnam is that their leader (at the time of the war) Ho Chi Minh.
He wrote about the plight of the American negro in the years prior to the Vietnam War.
He visited Harlem in the early 20th century and listened to the speeches of Marcus Garvey and by 1924 published articles about blacks struggle with the Klan and lynching.
He wrote “The Klan is for many reasons doomed to disappear. The Negroes, having learned during the war that they are a force if united, are no longer allowing their kinsmen to be beaten or murdered with impunity. They are replying to each attempt at violence by the Klan, in various states, the Negros defend themselves no less energetically”
Malcolm X had come out against the war as early as 1963.
Black people already knew that Vietnam was a classic example of a rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.
So when Muhammad Ali declared that he had no quarrel with the Vietcong, he undoubtedly spoke for many other African Americans as well.
I love this
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID3-vqADnRY)
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The French were financed by the USA. The war began when the French returned after WWII.
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Yes, the roots of the war do stretch back to French colonialism.
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Sometimes I wonder if the Americans have a love hate relationship with Vietnam. A humiliating defeat for America, but a secret admiration for the military prowess shown, for power is the one thing that Americans respect.
Korea was the first Asian power to humiliate America. Then Vietnam. Then Afghanistan. Who will be the next? Iran? North Korea?
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Domino Theory: You dispute, while Vietnam was surrounded by communism everywhere – in those days – China and Russia both supported their ideals in the SEA arena; Laos, Cambodia and Viet Nam did go to the communists!
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“Saigon fell in 1975.”
Did Saigon fall in 1975? Or was it liberated in 1975?
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I have seen this photo of the naked child running and it always made me sad. I have since learned her name Phan Thi Kim Phuc. She had been burned by napalm. This picture was always shown in Life magazine back in the day or some other periodicals depicting the horrors of the Vietnam war. I am amazed she survived to adulthood. This is nightmarish I shudder thinking about the pain to her little body and the fear she was experiencing very sad.
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@ Abagond
One of your better blogs dude…
@ HipHopRecords
I think the I can and ‘inventive’ minds of African Immigrants along with those of the collective Black American population will unite and form a train of thought away from diminishing mindsets.
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Another tragic element is how unnecessary it was. As far as I know the Viet Minh wasn’t particualry found of communism and Soviet and Chinese imperialism in particular. If the US hadn’t supported France’s misguided recolonizatin attempt, the emerging Vietnam probably would have rather become a Western ally than a Communist. At least the history after 1975 indicates that.
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I highly doubt that “winning hearts and minds” ist how guerrilla wars are won. The Viet Cong wasn’t particualry nice to Civilians either.
But they had a small but dedicated core that had a real stake in the war and a vision. Americans and its Southern allies didn’t.
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Thank you for this reminder of the misery the US has wrought throughout the world. Vietnam was a horrifying senseless war brought on by greedy white men with a large military means. In addition to the deaths, many lost their souls and still wander the streets, homeless and mentality ill. The awful thing is that George Bush grew up during this war but didn’t learn its lesson and dragged us into an unwinnable war in the Middle East. And the homeless and ill veterans of the latest war also roam the streets as we drink our lattes disconnected from the reality of the world. And some wonder now, “why do they hate us.”
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here we go!
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The Vietnam War formed the backdrop and sound track to my childhood of the 1960’s. I grew up in small and very remote and isolated town, but on television news I saw the protests and the violence at places like Kent State, and the small university in my town had its share of marches and protests. As a kid I assumed Vietnam shared a border with the US and was trying to invade our country. In my child’s logic, I could not imagine any other reason for engaging in such a bloody military conflict. I had many friends with older brothers who were drafted, some who did not return alive. This was the reality of families with boys born between 1950 and 1960. Later, some single young men began to move to town, war veterans suffering PTSD, seeking the end of the road (my town) to get away from the rest of humanity. As I got older I realized the profound degree to which our nation’s leadership lied to the nation about the war. I saw my parents say things like: “He is the President, he must know some secret things the rest of us don’t know, which is why he is escalating the war. We just have to trust him.” That small-town, parochial, child-like love of the rich man who lives in the mansion on the hill. It was this process that led me to first question my parents, something most kids go through at some point.
At present, my family is hosting a high school exchange student from Vietnam. She is from a small town near Hanoi, which would have been North Vietnam during the war. Her parents were born in 1971 and 1976. Recall the US fled the war in 1975, essentially ceding the nation to the North Vietnamese. Our exchange student’s parents have never known anything other than a unified Vietnam. It was war-ravaged, but has received assistance from China, sort of like Cuba did from the Soviet Union. To our student, the “American War” is abstract, a subject taught in history class, like we learn about the Civil War here. Young urban Vietnamese kids listen to K-Pop or watch Korean movies, not because they love them but because the production values of Korean media are generally the highest in the eastern portion of Asia and thus Korean entertainment products are popular throughout East and Southeast Asia. They also listen to American pop music and watch American movies and television.
We have hosted exchange students from China as well. Compared to Chinese students, the Vietnamese students don’t speak or read English well. The language ends up being their biggest hurdle here. However, unlike the Chinese students, the Vietnamese kids are not rich, spoiled, entitled brats. The Chinese kids show up with no luggage, just a credit card, and almost immediately the packages from all of the expensive designer places start arriving, and they continue arriving nonstop. People who have hosted Chinese exchange students use the term “The Little Emperor Syndrome” to describe their demeanor (this is used only for the boys — the girls are not like this at all). In contrast, the Vietnamese students are acutely aware that their families are stretching to send them here and they are hard working, focused, diligent, and humble.
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I used to pay money when I was a child to watch American War movies based on the Vietnam war. I remember being angry at those Vietnamese “brutes” that would kill those “freedom loving” Americans and poke their eyes out. I would be so sad for the Americans. Little did I know….
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@ mansamusa
@ Kiwi
If you read the whole paragraph you would know that the “fall of Saigon” means nothing more than the fall of the puppet government the US was propping up. You would also know that communists and nationalists would regard it as a victory, the US as a defeat. Nothing is being whitewashed.
Part of why I used “fall” was because of the domino metaphor later in the post.
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One thing about the Vietnam/American war that is not discussed too much these days is how rebellious some of the US troops became while stationed in Vietnam.
Many US troops were draftees. The wealthy and the well connected worked various scams to “slime out” of serving in Vietnam. If they could not avoid service they pulled strings to work away from combat zones either in the US or overseas. Most of the real fighting was done by working class White, Black Latino, Native American and Asian men.
Some servicemen resisted the war by combat refusals, going AWOL (absent without leave), desertions and fragging. According to some estimates, hundreds of American field officers and non-commissioned officers (sergeants, etc.) were killed by the troops under their command with rifles and fragmentation grenades.
According to History.net:
http://www.historynet.com/the-hard-truth-about-fragging.htm
In the years after Vietnam, the US armed forces went fully volunteer to avoid dealing with unwilling citizen conscripts in future wars. The Army has touted many benefits of an all volunteer “professional” army. One major benefit to Army brass was a marked decrease in resistance to authority and actions like fragging.
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@kartoffel this is an interesting summary of how the US tried to adapt to guerilla style warfare
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/phoenixmcg.html
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“why do they hate us.”
we are such good, humanitarian, exceptional, honest, peace loving people.
sthi, I cant think of enough good adjectives to call us.
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https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol51no2/a-retrospective-on-counterinsurgency-operations.html
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I think of the Vietnam War as starting in 1954 when the French were defeated and the US started sending in “military advisers” the way they do in Syria right now.
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Interestingly enough, Vietnam War is considered a huge mistake (and embarrassment) for the US but for “some reason” the US still does the same thing (producing the same type of conflicts and “interventions”) and not many people complain.
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@ Mira
About the only lasting lessons the US government learned from the Vietnam War were a) to avoid a draft at all costs and b) to pay for wars with deficit spending. It cuts down hugely on the complaints.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Indochina_in_World_War_II
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I was thinking kmt comintern etc as per usual found this, very interesting!
https://www.revolvy.com/main/index.php?s=Battle%20of%20Cao%20Bang%20(1979)
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That was 50 years ago today.
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@ Abagond:
America has so much blood on its hands.
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https://www.vox.com/2018/4/13/17215492/white-supremacy-ideology-racism-trump
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@Herneith
Not sure if this picture would appear here, but— Pls, tell me more 🙂
https://vk.com/razonypalabras?z=photo5657176_456239097%2Falbum5657176_00%2Frev
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https://www.britannica.com/place/Vietnam/The-conquest-of-Vietnam-by-France
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Reblogged this on The inconvenient Truths.
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