More than fifty years later, the Vietnam War continues to cast a long shadow over both Vietnam and the United States. The brutal conflict, which raged from 1955 to 1975, left millions dead, wounded, or uprooted. Its psychological toll endures, as do the physical consequences of chemical warfare.
For Washington, the War was a humiliation which caused it to reassess its superpower status at home and abroad. As David Brin remarks in A Rant About Stupidity, North Vietnamese commander Ho Chi Min “remains the only enemy leader who ever defeated us at war, and then only because our hubris (not decadence) got the better of us.”
For the American people, the War represented a profound shift in their faith in elected officials. According to Daniel Weiss, CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vietnam “changed almost everything about how we live, what we believe, how we select governance, how we think about the military.”
Origins
From the mid-19th century until World War II, Vietnam was a French colony known as French Indochina. After France was occupied by German forces, Germany’s allies, Japan, took the place of the French. Ho Chi Min, an avowed socialist, led a combination of groups (collectively known as the Viet Cong) to free Vietnam from the Japanese. However, after the War ended with an Allied victory, the French returned to seize their former colony.
This in turn led to the first Indochina War in which the United States backed France. Ho and his forces resisted and in 1954, the Geneva Accords ended French rule and temporarily divided the country into North and South. The Accords called for elections to unify the country but South Vietnam’s leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, refused, fearing a communist victory.
This fear was not unfounded. According to American president Dwight Eisenhower himself, “it was generally conceded that had an election been held, Ho Chi Minh would have been elected Premier.” The division between North and South deepened as Cold War politics swept across South East Asia.
Diem, the South Vietnamese leader, was an anti-Communist, however, he was also a Catholic in a primarily Buddhist country. According to the Miller Center, he was unable to consolidate his rule, and governed “with the support of a military supplied and trained by the United States and with substantial U.S. economic assistance.”
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US involvement
The Cold War was fought between America and the USSR in almost every part of the world except America and the USSR itself. With both countries possessing a nuclear arsenal, direct warfare would lead to mutually assured destruction. Instead the two attempted to form spheres of influence characterised by either communist or capitalist governance.
In South East Asia, this resulted in unrest in the Philippines, Malaysia, Burma, Laos and Thailand. However, Vietnam was the most critical front. US Presidents ranging from Eisenhower, John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johson, and Richard Nixon all believed that the fall of South Vietnam would create a domino effect, engulfing the region under Communist – and by extension Russian – influence.
American troops in Vietnam (Reuters)
Initially under Eisenhower, the US provided financial aid and military advisors. Kennedy increased the number of advisors by 16,000 but like his predecessor, did not send American troops to Vietnam. After his assassination, his successor, Johnson publicly vowed to avoid the Vietnam War as much as possible but when North Vietnamese boats allegedly attacked US ships in 1964, the situation changed dramatically. Following the attack, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, enabling Johnson broad authority to escalate military action. By the next year, Johson deployed ground troops, peaking at 543,000 by 1969.
As the American commitment increased, the War’s popularity, and the popularity of Johnson began to decrease. The bloody Tet Offensive that was launched by the North Vietnamese in early January of 1968 seemed to only reinforce the thought that Johnson’s policies were failing. While his domestic policies were hugely successful, his failures on the international stage prompted Johnson not to stand for re-election.
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Nixon, who beat Johnson’s Democratic replacement, promised to withdraw from the conflict. Like Johnson, his rhetoric proved hollow and more US soldiers died in Vietnam during his administration than during the rest of the wartime administrations combined. In 1975, a peace agreement was signed and America formally withdrew from Vietnam.
Implications
About 58,000 American soldiers were killed during the Vietnam War, and another 304,000 were wounded. Those who survived, returned home psychologically scarred. As the psychiatrist Chaim F. Shatan, documented in a 1972 New York Times article, veterans were plagued by guilt, felt isolated, anxious and depressed.
Vietnam was also considered the first war that Americans could watch unfold at home. Through their televisions, they saw children burnt by radiation, villages engulfed in fire, dissenters executed en mass and dogs roaming the streets with human bones in their mouths.
A 1967 march protesting the Vietnam War in Washington (Reuters)
The War was a costly failure, especially when it came to the public’s trust in their government. As Vietnam War veteran Karl Marlantes opined in a 2017 New York Times article, “Vietnam changed us as a country. In many ways, for the worse: It made us cynical and distrustful of our institutions, especially of government.”
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Chemical gas being sprayed (Reuters)
For Vietnam, the consequences were even more severe. American planes had dropped twice as many bombs on Vietnam than they had used during the second World War. They also sprayed millions of gallons of chemical agents across the countryside. An estimated 4 million Vietnamese were killed or wounded on both sides of the conflict, including 1.3 million civilians in South Vietnam. Five million acres of farmland were destroyed, devastating rice production, and leading to food shortages that lasted decades after the War ended. Exposure to chemical agents caused cancers, birth defects and neurological disorders that affected anywhere between three to five million Vietnamese across generations.
After the Northern victory in 1975, the country was unified under communist rule. People from the South faced widespread discrimination and over 2.5 million of its people were detained in re-education camps. The subsequent US trade embargo also devastated the country, plunging millions into poverty.