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In the mid to late 60's, I came to oppose the war in Vietnam. Like most Americans, I had grown up with a fierce patriotic pride in my nation. My father’s National Guard unit was mustered into the Army during World War II. And although he did not see combat, he was awaiting orders to the Pacific when Japan surrendered. I came of age reading The Diary of Anne Frank and William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Later I read Adolph Hitler’s blueprint for power Mein Kampf. I had no doubts that the evil of Nazism required and justified America’s participation in the Second World War.
During my college years, a wonderful, brilliant woman for whom I worked one summer at the Office of Education in Washington, D.C. had me read George Kennan, considered the theoretical father of America’s “containment” policy. Kennan believed America needed to contain communism, halting its spread from country to country in a chain reaction like falling dominos (President Eisenhower is credited with the “domino” image.) So in the early 1960’s, I saw the Vietnam War through the lenses of what I then knew and believed.
What changed?
When I returned to graduate school, I encountered the Vietnam War in more personal ways. In my Freshman English classes, I taught young men who were returning from the war and young men who were trying to hold on to their student deferments to keep from going to the war. I decided I needed to understand for myself why our government had involved itself in an ever-increasing military commitment to Vietnam. So I did my own research and taught a unit on Vietnam in my freshman classes.
Here’s what I learned:
Our government’s rationale for the war seemed clear – to keep Vietnam (or one more domino) from falling under the communist rule of Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh forces.
But as with so much in this world, the roots of this war were anything but clear.
In the 1950’s Vietnam had endured French colonial rule for nearly 100 years. Following World War II, Ho Chi Minh, a communist, yet also a fervent nationalist, wanted the victorious western allies to recognize the independence of Vietnam. During World War II, Ho and his forces had allied themselves with America, carrying out guerilla attacks against both the Japanese and the Nazi French government within their country.
But the western nations accepted the reinstatement of French rule. When Ho’s forces, the Viet Minh, were on the verge of driving out the French by force of arms in 1954, the western nations became alarmed. Some in Eisenhower’s administration urged the President to use nuclear weapons against the Vietnamese forces, advice Eisenhower prudently chose not to take.
Following the French defeat in 1954, Ho Chi Minh announced the independence of Vietnam and became a national hero. Treaties known as the Geneva Accords ended French colonial rule in Vietnam. The Accords called for a temporary partition of Vietnam into North and South, with national elections to be held in two years to create a unified government. The North was then controlled by Ho Chi Minh. In the South, Ngo Dinh Diem, backed by President Eisenhower, was appointed Prime Minister. The anti-communist and Catholic Diem was perceived by the West as a political rival to Ho Chi Minh to govern all of Vietnam.
But national elections were never held. Diem proved to be inept and corrupt. Knowing he would be defeated, he refused to allow the South to participate in national elections. There was little impetus among western nations to push for these elections knowing that Ho Chi Minh would certainly win. As the Diem regime grew more oppressive and unpopular, the people turned against it, more and more supporting a broadening insurgency in the South, led by rebels known as the Viet Cong.
The Americans who had helped bring Diem to power also eventually turned against him. In 1963, President Kennedy gave a green light to South Vietnamese Army officers who, with the knowledge of the CIA, were plotting a coup against the government. Diem was deposed and brutally assassinated. What followed was a succession of weak leaders in the South and America’s escalating attempts to keep Ho Chi Minh from assuming governmental power, even by means of a national election.
American involvement in Vietnam began with a few thousand military advisors sent by Eisenhower. But by 1968, under the escalation of President Lyndon Johnson, America had 537,000 troops in that country.
As I looked at some of this history, I could not help but ask: why? And how did we get so deeply committed? To what ends were we willing to go to keep Ho Chi Minh from ruling a government he would easily have attained by popular election? As one American GI was so memorably quoted during those years, referring to a Vietnamese village: they had “to waste it in order to save it.” Was that what we were doing to the entire country of Vietnam?
I had other questions as well. Did President Kennedy escalate our involvement in Vietnam for pure political reasons? Some historians say Kennedy needed to prove he was not “soft” on communism, as Nixon charged in the presidential election. In another year, had Kennedy not been murdered, he would have faced re-election. What about Lyndon Johnson? Did he decide that he needed to “win” the war in Vietnam to prove his mettle as President in the shadow of the martyred and popular John Kennedy? The American death toll in Vietnam ultimately exceeded 55,000. Vietnamese deaths were in the millions.
And for what?
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