Why were we in Vietnam?
by Dan Ford

France tried to assimilate its colonies to the home culture, but didn't do a particularly good job of it. The top layer of Indochinese society studied in French schools, many Indochinese worshipped in French Catholic churches, and the opportunists of course did business with the French. As a result, as a French admiral put it, with only a bit of exaggeration: "On our side, we have only Christians and crooks." Much later, the Americans would find themselves in the same position.

After the Germans invaded and occupied France in 1940, the Japanese moved into French Indochina so as to use it as a base to pursue their war against China. And in December 1941, the Japanese used Indochina to launch its attack on the British colonies of Singapore and Malaya (now called Malaysia).

President Franklin Roosevelt didn't like the idea of colonial governments in Asia, and he especially disliked the French colonial government of Indochina, which collaborated with the Japanese through most of the war. The U.S. Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency) cooperated instead with the Vietnamese communists under Ho Chi Minh. As a partial result, Ho was able to declare the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in August 1945, within days of the Japanese surrender. It was the second communist state in Asia, and the first communist state anywhere not to have a common border with the Soviet Union. (Ho's birth name was Nguyen Sinh Cung. The Vietnamese put the family name first, but almost always call an individual by his given name--the last in the series. Ho is the exception because his chosen name is a political statement--roughly, "Bringer of Light." He was "Uncle Ho" to his followers and, later, to the anti-war movement in the United States.)

So what was wrong with communists in Vietnam?

The western Allies handled the conquered Japanese territories in various ways. Their solution for "French Indochina" was to let the Chinese occupy the north, while British Commonwealth troops occupied the south. As colonialists themselves, the British were sympathetic to the French, and it was in Saigon that French "paras" (airborne soldiers), Legionnaires, and civilians evicted Ho's representatives and raised the French flag. In the winter of 1945-46, the French re-established their control over southern Vietnam, and in February 1946 they began to move again into the north. Not one nation had recognized Ho's government, and over time the French army, including the Foreign Legion (postwar, many of its soldiers were German), the Moroccan Legion (black troops from North Africa), and native units with French officers, took control of the north. But, like the Americans after them, they controlled only the roads and the population centers.

Elsewhere, the country was ruled by the Viet Minh, as Ho's forces were called. (The full name was the Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh, meaning Vietnam Independence League.) The two sides began a long, seesaw battle for control of the countryside. The tide turned against the French in 1949, when the Chinese communists under Mao Tse-tung (later spelled Mao Zedong) finally defeated the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. Finally Ho Chi Minh shared a border with another communist state.

Then, in June 1950, communist North Korea invaded pro-western South Korea. The United States sent troops in a successful effort to evict the North Koreans from the south, followed by a disastrously unsuccessful attempt to chase them back to the Yalu River--the Chinese border. This brought China into the Korean War, which in turn changed everything in Vietnam as well. The United States began to pay most of the costs of the French effort to crush the Viet Minh. It also sent military aid, including U.S. Air Force transports flown by American civilian pilots to support the French Expeditionary Force.

When the Korean War ended, huge quantities of captured American military equipment were funneled to the Viet Minh by the Chinese. Some of this equipment was used to defeat the French garrison in 1954 at Dienbienphu, on the Vietnam-Laotian border. After Dienbienphu, France wanted nothing more to do with its long-running disaster in Vietnam. At a peace conference in Geneva, Switzerland, it gave up its "Indochinese" colonies. Cambodia and Laos became independent countries. Vietnam was divided into two nations, a communist north under Ho Chi Minh and a pro-western south under the emperor Bao Dai. The promise, never kept, was that the two halves of Vietnam would decide on a common government in 1956. South Vietnam, backed by the United States, reneged on the election because it would inevitably have led to a communist state: Ho could have turned out virtually 100 percent of northern voters, while the vote in the south would have been divided. Instead, a western-style government was established in Saigon under President Ngo Dinh Diem.

So Vietnam followed the pattern earlier established in Germany and Korea, divided into one half supported by the communist bloc and another supported by the west and especially the United States. About a million northerners "voted with their feet" and relocated to South Vietnam. Many were Catholics who feared for their future under communism, and who in the south became a hard core of support for Diem, himself a Catholic.

Those of you who know Russia only as a crime-ridden third-world country may have a hard time understanding how powerful it was in the years following World War II, both as a military force and as the home of the communist ideology. In the 1950s, communism was on the march around the world. Eastern Europe had been occupied and communized by the Soviet Union in 1944-45. China went communist in 1949. The Korean War was fought to a draw in 1950-1953, and the communists successfully won half of Vietnam from the French in 1955. The Soviet Union acquired American nuclear technology, then leapt ahead of the U.S. in heavy-lift missile technology, making a Russian the first man in space. Fidel Castro established a communist state in Cuba, 90 miles off the American coast. The Cold War was a reality, a hot war seemed entirely possible, and American victory in those conflicts was by no means guaranteed.

How did the United States get involved?

President Dwight Eisenhower was the first to meddle in Vietnam, sending a military mission to help the new South Vietnamese government build an army able to prevent a North Vietnamese invasion across the 17th parallel, Korea-style. The first American soldier killed by hostile action in Vietnam was Captain Harry Cramer, part of a group of U.S. Army Special Forces ("Green Berets") who were training the Vietnamese in guerrilla warfare. At the graduation ceremony on October 21, 1957, communist guerrillas dropped mortar shells on the training site near Nha Trang. Cramer was killed, an American sergeant lost an arm, and there were several Vietnamese casualties as well. Because the United States didn't recognize a combat situation in Vietnam, Cramer's death was officially listed as the result of a accidental explosion, and his name wasn't entered on the Vietnam Wall war memorial until 1983.

John Kennedy became president in 1961, promising to "pay any price, bear any burden" to defend the free world against communism. He built the American military presence in South Vietnam to 16,000 men (and a few women, mostly nurses). They served as advisers to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, typically a captain and a sergeant with each ARVN battalion of about 500 men. They operated helicopter units in direct support of Vietnamese military operations, and secretly flew armed trainers and World War II bombers on combat operations. And the Green Berets set up "Strike Force" encampments along the Cambodian border to stop the infiltration of soldiers and equipment from North Vietnam.

The anti-communist war was not going well in 1963, and Kennedy approved a coup in which Diem was murdered by the South Vietnamese generals. Shortly thereafter, Kennedy himself was murdered. These two killings, of all the millions of deaths associated with the Vietnam War, were hugely important in setting the United States and South Vietnam on a course that ended in disaster.

Kennedy might have stopped there, with an advisory effort, but the new president Lyndon Johnson didn't have that option, or didn't think he did. Rather than betray Kennedy's legacy, Johnson escalated the war in the hope that American pilots and ground troops would be able to accomplish what the South Vietnamese military had not. Following a probably phony attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on two American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964, Johnson ordered "retaliation" strikes against the patrol-boat bases--the first military action against North Vietnam. The U.S. Senate voted a "war powers resolution" with only two dissenting votes. So when you read, as you will, that the great American mistake in Vietnam was waging war without a declaration of war, remember that Lyndon Johnson believed that the Senate had indeed given him "the functional equivalent of a declaration of war," and that it passed with only one less "no" vote than our declaration of war against Japan in December 1941.

Shortly thereafter, U.S. Marines were landed to guard an airfield near Danang. And in 1965, the first American combat troops were fighting North Vietnamese regulars on the ground. The U.S. advisory effort had morphed into a war very like the earlier one in Korea, fought mostly by American troops with the help of the local army and a few detachments from friendly nations.

For more about American thinking when escalation began, see the State Department White Paper on this site.

Who were we fighting, exactly?

Here is where your teacher and I are most likely to disagree. The popular view of the Vietnam War is that the Americans were meddling in a civil war between the South Vietnamese government and the National Liberation Front. Heck, you can read entire history books in which "the Front" is the only enemy mentioned, at least until sympathetic North Vietnamese traveled down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to give the "people's forces" a helping hand. But this isn't the way the war developed at all.

When the country was divided in 1955, about 100,000 Viet Minh guerrillas who had been fighting in the south were repatriated to the north. Others greased and buried their weapons and returned to civilian life. Very early, however, they began to operate against the South Vietnamese government much as they had previously operated against the French, murdering landlords and village officials, levying taxes on the peasants, and recruiting new soldiers. They were aided by the former southern guerrillas who had gone north, been rested and retrained, and then sent down the jungle route that would become famous as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. (Basically, the route began in North Vietnam, moved west into Laos and south through Laos and Cambodia, before moving east again into South Vietnam, neatly bypassing the ARVN divisions stationed at the 17th Parallel to deter the expected invasion.)

The rebellion became official in October 1957, when the communists in the south--in obedience to instructions from North Vietnam--organized themselves into 37 armed companies. The South Vietnamese government looked upon them as bandits, and regarded them as a job for the police.

Obviously the new force couldn't be called Viet Minh, because the vast majority of Vietnamese regarded the Viet Minh as the army that had liberated their country from the French (and Ho Chi Minh as the George Washington figure of the Vietnamese revolution). So a new name was coined: Viet Cong, meaning Vietnamese communist. By whatever name, the military force was well established by the time the National Liberation Front was formed in December 1960. And the NLF was never more than that--a front for the actual managers of the insurrection, who were Ho Chi Minh and his chief of staff, General Vo Nguyen Giap. Make no mistake: the rebellion in the south was conceived, supported, and directed from North Vietnam. The southerners and the northerners didn't always agree on tactics, but they had the same aim: to overthrow the Saigon government and unite the northern and southern halves of the country.

At first, the assistance consisted of former Viet Minh guerrillas, returning to the south, along with Chinese copies of the Russian AK-47 assault rifle. (It was still true, however, that most Viet Cong weapons were captured from the government forces, especially heavy weapons such as machine guns and mortars.) In 1964, the first North Vietnamese regulars came down the Ho Chi Minh Trail--about 10,000 troops that year. Meanwhile, the "trail" was upgraded to a modern supply line with hardened roads and bridges that could handle heavy trucks. The trail was protected by anti-aircraft guns, and underground workshops, barracks, hospitals, and gasoline depots were built at regular intervals. These not only supported the convoys coming down the trail, but also provided a safe fall-back for the troops operating in South Vietnam.

What about the Gulf of Tokin Incident?

This is such a big question that I have moved it into its own file: The Gulf of Tonkin Incidents of 1964.

Who were the American soldiers in Vietnam?

The popular image of Vietnam is that the war was fought by poor black teenagers. In fact, the demographic profile of the American fighting man in Vietnam was not much different from his brothers-in-arms in other wars, with due allowance for the changing times.

Note that the overwhelming majority of Americans who served in Vietnam were not combat soldiers. (The "tooth to tail" or "ass to grass" ratio is often estimated as 1 to 10.) The only sound measurement of who was in harm's way is to take the deaths--and even here the measurement isn't exact, since young, black, and working-class soldiers are probably more likely to die in non-combat accidents than those who are older, white, and from middle-class backgrounds. With those caveats, here are the figures:

In short, the typical American combat soldier in the Vietnam War was a white high-school graduate in his early twenties.

What kind of training did American soldiers have?

One of my correspondents asked this question, and she proved quite unable to understand my answers. I realized that young people who have never been in the military don't have any conception of how it works, so I wrote her a long letter explaining my own basic training at Fort Dix in 1956. This was ten years before Vietnam hotted up, but I don't think that things had changed much, with the exception of the rifle and rifle grenade that I used. See it at basic training.

Wasn't it tough, fighting in the jungle?

On the moderated Vietnam newsgroup, a veteran who signs himself Dino posted this view of wilderness combat in South Vietnam:

"For those who have never been in a tropical jungle they look impenetrable from the outside. Jungle is nothing more than forest. I live in Florida and we call small and large forests, hammocks or bayheads. A cypress bayhead looks impenetrable from the outside and in a way that's true. They are very difficult to get inside because they are surrounded by brush and small trees and vines, but once inside it is relatively easy to walk around. The same is true with mangroves. I've read in books where mangrove forests are impenetrable, yet I have walked through untold miles of mangrove forests.

In Vietnam there were many types of forests. The ones called triple canopy were the best to walk through. I loved walking through triple canopy forests because the lack of sunlight prevented undergrowth to a large extent. Some types of vegetation such as ferns like to grow without direct sunlight but normally the triple canopy forest was a pleasure to walk through and relatively free of brush. It was also cooler there.

Even some Vietnam vets have the mistaken belief that one had to hack their way though a triple canopy jungle with machetes. This simply is not true. There were areas where vines and other vegetation were too thick to walk through but these were areas void of the large trees which blocked sunlight.

The term "triple canopy" is overused. Much of the forests in Vietnam were not triple canopy; they were forests with trees of relatively the same height with small and large open areas. This type of varied forest was difficult to walk through. Mostly we walked on the trails made by the VC and NVA. This was dangerous but often those trails led us to hidden sites."

How many Americans were POWs?

794 Americans are known to have been prisoners of the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese, or their allied forces in Southeast Asia.

Of that number, 687 were released at one time or another, most of them in Operation Homecoming in the spring of 1973. Another 36 escaped from captivity, and 71 died while prisoners, the majority in South Vietnam.

However, many thousands of Americans are listed as "missing in action" in Vietnam (the same is true of earlier conflicts). Most were killed under circumstances that made it impossible to recover their bodies or otherwise confirm their identiy. Very likely, a few are prisoners who died in captivity. It is also possible that a few were held against their will after Operation Homecoming and the 1975 fall of the South Vietnamese government. It is also possible, though in my judgment extremely unlikely, that a few American servicemen are still alive in Southeast Asia or even in the former Soviet Union.

(The Homework FAQ will be continued as time permits)