"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

Introduction

“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time,

and your government when it deserves it”

(Mark Twain)

i. The Vietnam War

With the end of World War II, the economically developed and politically stable democracies, the so-called First World nations, led by the United States, engaged in the global struggle known as the Cold War with the Second World or socialist states in Eastern Europe, which were unified and controlled by the Soviet Union. The conflict had actually begun before the war was over, with the “Big Three”—the US, the USSR, and Great Britain—planning to divide up the globe among them, but the opening salvo of the Cold War, at least symbolically, was fired by Winston Churchill in a speech of March 1946 in the United States, when he declared that “an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” a warning about what he regarded as the danger to the “Free World” of Soviet expansionism and the lack of the necessary western military strength to counteract it. While President Truman apparently approved of the content of this speech, which took place in his home state of Missouri and pointedly referred to the “special relationship” of the US and Great Britain, US officials feared that what Churchill really wanted was to enlist their country in propping up the crumbling British Empire. For his part, Josef Stalin predictably referred to the speech as imperialistic “war mongering.”1

The Cold War was waged for the hearts and minds, as well as the material wealth, of the rest of the planet, inevitably grouped together as the “Third World.” This was a geographically, politically, and culturally diverse group of countries that could only be perceived as a cluster of states by their common condition of instability, because, as Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, they formed what was, in effect, “a worldwide zone of revolution—whether just achieved, impending or possible.”2 Attempting to suppress it, the United States identified this revolutionary instability with the Soviet Union, which in turn attempted to exploit it, for the postwar Pax Americana reigned only over the First World and could not for the time being reach or affect the Second World, which remained under the control of the Warsaw Pact. The fear engendered on both sides by the prospect of global thermonuclear war between the two superpowers actually contributed to the military stability even while the maneuvering of propaganda and espionage contributed to the political instability of the Cold War. According to Hobsbawm,

Almost from the start of the Cold War, the U.S.A. set out to combat this danger [i.e. revolution] by all means, from economic aid and ideological propaganda through official and unofficial military subversion to major war; preferably in alliance with a friendly or bought local regime, but if need be without local support.3

The many wars waged against perceived global Communist expansion, numbering over a hundred between the end of World War II and the demise of the Soviet Union and other Communist states in the late 1980s, were all fought in the Third World. The most extensive of these wars, and the only one, besides the Korean War of 1950-1953, in which American troops fought, was the war in Vietnam. This conflict may be described from a longer historical perspective as the “Vietnam Wars,”4 since Vietnam’s anti-colonial war against the French (1945-1954) was taken up again right after World War II once the Japanese had been driven out of the region by the Allied forces and the Vietnamese. The war(s) in Vietnam did not even end with the withdrawal of the American interventionist forces in 1973 and the subsequent fall of South Vietnam in 1975. The unified north and south, now officially called the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, suppressed continued opposition in the south of the country, invaded Cambodia to overthrow the US-supported regime of Pol Pot, and resisted a Chinese incursion that was only the most recent one of centuries of attempted Chinese expansionism southward into Vietnam.

What is generally thought of as the Vietnam War is more narrowly defined as the ten year hot war (1965-1975) waged between the South Vietnamese government supported by the US, and the revolutionary forces of the National Liberation Front (NLF), the official name of the Communist guerrilla insurgents in South Vietnam—known by the anti-Communist southern regime derogatively as “Vietcong,” or Vietnamese Communists—which was encouraged and later supported, but crucially not controlled, by the government of North Vietnam.5

One might contest, however, this ten year period of the American War in Vietnam as too brief to comprehend (in both senses) the conflict, especially since American intervention in colonial Indochina began as early as the 1950s, with the US taking over the conflict after the decisive military defeat of the French by General Vo Nguyen Giap’s forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.6 Simply put, the American war in Vietnam was waged based on the goal of a South Vietnam free of Communism, but how that goal was established is worth examining. Fortunately, the process has been described in detail by the US government itself in the collection of documents that came to be known as the “Pentagon Papers.”

The Pentagon Papers were based on “investigative reporting by Neil Sheehan, written by Sheehan, Hedrick Smith, E.W. Kensworthy and Fox Butterfield,” from the collected papers and documents of the secret Pentagon study of the Vietnam War, originally commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. They consisted of a “massive top-secret history of the United States role in Indochina,” which took a year and a half to write, was written by anonymous government historians—including officials from the State department, intellectuals from government financed institutes, and military career officers—and incorporated material from the White House, the CIA and the military Joint Chiefs of Staff. There were some 3000 pages of narrative history and more than 4000 pages of documents appended to the narrative, all collected in 47 volumes. Daniel Ellsberg, an analyst for the Rand Corporation, illegally copied the collection of secret documents.7 The New York Times obtained most of the collection and began publishing a series of articles based on them in June 1971. The US Justice Department tried to suppress publication, alleging a breach of “national defense interests,” but, in June of the same year, the Supreme Court upheld the right to publish under the First Amendment to the Constitution.8

The narrative leading up to the ten year war may be summarized as follows. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s original plan for placing French Indochina under international trusteeship to prepare it for independence was diluted at the 1945 Yalta Conference in the interests of European colonialism. The British, fearing for their own overseas colonies and aided by President Truman’s administration, which, for its part, feared postwar Communist gains, supported the restoration of French sovereignty after the war, ignoring the North Vietnam leader Ho Chi Minh’s plea for the help of the US in preventing that outcome. The Eisenhower administration also gave the French material support in their ultimately unsuccessful attempt to suppress the Viet Minh, the anti-colonialist forces in the north, who had fought for independence against Japan before finally defeating the French.9

The Truman Doctrine (1947) had pledged American resistance to Communism wherever it should emerge. The succeeding president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. believed that Ho Chi Minh, who had repeatedly, unsuccessfully, and—as it would turn out, tragically—sued for US support against French colonialism, even citing the values stated in the American Declaration of Independence, was initially ignored and eventually deemed “an instrument of international Communism.”10 With the end of World War II and throughout the following decades, however, Ho Chi Minh was more concerned with keeping his country independent of all foreign forces, including Communist China on his northern border. The Americans, however, believed that the Chinese (and the Soviets) were dictating strategy and supplying arms to North Vietnam. Ho accepted the aid of weapons and supplies from both Moscow and Beijing but there is no hard evidence that he allowed these politically allied nations to impose their strategies of defense on North Vietnam.11

According to Fox Butterfield, the “watershed decision” to intervene in Indochina first came after the fall of Nationalist China to the Communists (1949) under Mao Zedong. At this development, Washington, fearing further Communist advances in Asia, abruptly ended its wavering about whether or not to support French colonial interests by offering financial aid to the Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dai, a puppet of French colonialism, and to the French military forces, to fight against the anti-colonial, Communist-led Viet Minh (eventually, the US would pay $1.1 billion in 1954, or 78% of the French war effort).12 With this decision, the US committed itself inexorably to blocking further Communist expansion in Asia. The justification for this came to be called the “Domino Theory,” first enunciated by the National Security Council (NSC) in February 1950. Never seriously questioned, the Domino Theory supposed that the “loss” of a single country to Communism would endanger all the neighboring countries and eventually all of Asia and even beyond.13 The principal justification for the war in Vietnam therefore was the strategic need to “hold the line,” or, in the language of the controlling metaphor, to prevent the dominoes (states) from tumbling one after another.

David Halberstam claims that it was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, the ultimate cold warrior, who believed in “our cause, our innocence and our worthiness”—as well as our political advantage—for Dulles was convinced that the US could go into Vietnam without the taint of French colonialism: “We could start in South Vietnam,” Dulles decided, “by sending a couple of hundred American advisors there” (curiously, however, Dulles also thought that American chances for success in Vietnam were no more than one in ten).14 As stated above, by 1950, the official policy of the US government on Indochina, as stated in NSC 64, declared that the Communists’ war was “one phase of anticipated plans to seize all of Southeast Asia,” and recommended that all practicable measures be taken to prevent further expansion.15 As a response to the French military defeat by the Viet Minh forces at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Eisenhower publicly invoked the Domino Theory, which would be cited then and thereafter as signifying the global danger of other countries falling to Communism—a predictable tragedy that only firm American intervention could prevent.

The argument about when the war actually began is nicely reflected in a passage from Michael Herr’s Dispatches:

You couldn’t find two people who agreed about when it began, how could you say when it began going off? Mission intellectuals like 1945 as the reference date; if you saw far back as War II and the Japanese occupation you were practically a historical visionary. ‘Realists’ said that it began for us in 1961, and the common run of Mission folk insisted on 1965, post-Tonkin Resolution, as though all the killing eJthat had gone before wasn’t really war.”16

Politically, the US engagement in Vietnam may be said to have begun with the division of the country. With the signing of the Geneva accords on July 21, 1954, the country was split into what was to be regarded as two military zones along the 17th parallel, to be administered by two civilian governments: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) to the north, and what was then called the “State of Vietnam” in the south. The military forces pertaining to both sides were to regroup north and south of this line after the signing of the agreement, and nationwide elections were to be held within a two-year time period to decide who would govern the entire country.17 The US refused to sign the agreement, thereby undermining its effectiveness, because it was thought that Ho Chi Minh, who was widely perceived as the leader opposed to foreign occupation, would win the elections. Responsibility for maintaining order belonged to the signatories of the armistice: the DRV in the north and the French in the south. Three months before the deadline for holding the elections, however, the French forces pulled out, in effect turning over political power in the south to the anti-Communist regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Dulles had, in any case, already begun bypassing the French and dealing directly with Diem.18

A hot war erupted when Diem, encouraged by the Americans, declared the southern part of the country the independent Republic of South Vietnam (1955). The guerrilla forces of the NLF in the south thereupon devoted themselves to undermining Diem’s regime. The US sent military advisors, civilian aid workers, and a great deal of money to South Vietnam to aid the southern regime in repressing the opposition in a series of actions that were justified and approved of at the time as part of a praiseworthy effort to help preserve the freedom of the new nation by repelling a supposed Communist invasion from the north. It is surprising to learn from the Pentagon Papers that the US military was initially opposed to sending troops to Vietnam. As the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised: “Indochina is devoid of decisive military objectives and the allocation of more than token U.S. armed forces to that area would be a serious diversion of limited U.S. capabilities,”19 a realistic assessment compared to the wishful thinking of the American civilian officials who would prevail.