US history: Vietnam according to reader's digest - Essay Example

US History: Vietnam according to Reader's Digest By You're The ironic truth about most of the wars in which the United States has been involved is that they have not been about promoting freedom, as much as they have been about extending American hegemony, political or economic. American involvement in the two World Wars may be said to be the exception: both of those conflicts featured enemies that sought world conquest, and the horrible plans that Adolf Hitler had for those who were not of Aryan descent, and particularly those of Jewish descent, made a military attempt to stop those plans a moral imperative for the rest of the world. The Vietnam War has hazy motivations at best: an abstract worry about a governmental change in countries on the other side of the planet, summed up by the American leadership as the "domino theory" - the idea that if one country became Communist, so would the next, and the next, until the whole world (except the United States) was run by what Americans saw as the oppression of socialism (Barron and Paul 1977). The war in Vietnam was different from most of the other conflicts in American history. There was not a clear point of entry into the conflict - a stark contrast with the horrific night of Pearl Harbor, for example. The rationale behind United States involvement lacked the hearty sentiments of Manifest Destiny or the hated enemies Kaiser Bill or Adolf Hitler. It may have been these murky beginnings that made the war such an unpopular one, and a topic that enervated rather than energized the American public. It may have been this lack of unity regarding the Vietnam conflict that offended President Johnson, who sought to turn the conflict around and make it a positive factor in American society. This American adjustment in strategy led to a change in the Communist strategy as well. Because the Communists knew that the American government did not have a specific vision behind its military intervention in Vietnam, they believed that they would be able to defeat the technologically and numerically superior American forces by drawing the war out, and getting the United States into a slow, bogged-down conflict that would wear away at public opinion and political will. At the same time, the South Vietnamese became increasingly unreliable allies. After the coup that toppled Diem, the South Vietnamese government changed over and over. Rather than admit that the United States was supporting a government that had only the shakiest claims of being a stable democracy, however, President Johnson listened to the shrill claims of the far right, who claimed that if the United States pulled out of Vietnam, it would "drive America's first line of defense back to Waikiki Beach, in Hawaii, or even to the coast of California" (Barron and Paul 1977). By 1968, there were more than 500,000 troops in Vietnam, and the annual cost of the war was over $30 billion. However, there was no apparent end to the conflict that anyone could see. Just as important to the American defeat as the change in Vietnamese military tactics was the draining loss of morale at home. Across the world, opinion turned against the United States. There were several countries that sent home their Peace Corps volunteers. The French (who, ironically, had been the ones to lose to Vietnam in the first place) ordered NATO to leave France in 1966 (Barron and Paul 1977). Domestically, there were many universities that had "teach-ins" as early as 1965, and as time progressed; these protests became enormous, particularly as the draft took away more and more of America's young men (Barron and Paul 1977). Many draftees fled to Canada, so that they would not have to fight in Vietnam and others risked imprisonment by burning their draft cards in public protests. Protesters marched by the hundreds of thousands in New York City and San Francisco. Televisions teemed with images of American soldiers burning straw huts that belonged to some of the poorest people on the planet and dropping napalm on groups of civilians (Barron and Paul 1977). When the war was not on television, the hearings held by Senator Fulbright, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, featured famous public figures delivering antiwar sentiments in Senate hearings - because of the sense that the government had made the war seem more winnable than it actually was, the idea of a "credibility gap" between the government and the American people grew in popularity. The National Liberation Front was the official organization for those in South Vietnam who wanted to overthrow Diem's government. Created on December 20, 1960, the NLF had only one requirement for membership: applicants had to be opposed to Diem's rule. While the American government scorned the NLF as a mere puppet of the North Vietnamese Communist government, giving it the slur "Viet Cong," there are many who were inside and outside the NLF who claimed that the majority of its members were not Communists - thus showing how unpopular Diem had actually become. President Kennedy's policy toward Diem was neither full assistance nor full rejection: the United States supplied advisers and equipment to the South Vietnamese government, but did not commit a large-scale complement of troops to assist Diem's military in its conflict against the NLF (Louis R. Stockstill 1969). This level of assistance was not sufficient to keep the South Vietnamese government stable. After Diem's brother led raids on the Buddhist pagodas throughout the country, claiming that the priests were harboring Communists, there were protests throughout the country, including one in Saigon where a Buddhist priest set himself on fire. The Americans gave some of Diem's generals support for a coup, and so on November 1, 1963, Diem and his brother were captured and later killed. On November 22, however, President Kennedy was assassinated, bringing Vice President Lyndon Johnson into the role of Chief Executive (John G. Hubbell 1976). At this point in time, there were 16,000 American military advisers stationed in Vietnam. However, the political difficulties in South Vietnam did not seem to be abating, which made many wonder what the effectiveness of those advisers was. Even before the attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin, the new President was already planning a significant increase in the American military presence in South Vietnam. Matters accelerated on August 2 and 4, 1964, when the North Vietnamese attacked an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin (John G. Hubbell 1976). The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was the American political response, which gave the President wide-ranging executive powers to use during times of war. The military response to the attacks was a series of limited air attacks against North Vietnam. There was much dissent inside the government as to how militarily involved the next steps should be - the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged an expanded air campaign over the north, while the civilians in government wanted to be more choosy about the bombing targets. While all of this arguing was going on, the NLF attacked two American army installations in the south, which led President Johnson to institute Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign, and to send significant troop increases into the south (John G. Hubbell 1976). Whether or not the moral aimlessness has pervaded American policy since the Second World War is not within the scope of this paper; whether the use of the ultimate weapon in Japan took whatever morality remained in war and replaced it with an unending game of chicken is not relevant to this thesis; however, the works of Reader's Digest regarding the Vietnam conflict feature this moral aimlessness in close detail. This American adjustment in strategy led to a change in the Communist strategy as well. Because the Communists knew that the American government did not have a specific vision behind its military intervention in Vietnam, they believed that they would be able to defeat the technologically and numerically superior American forces by drawing the war out, and getting the United States into a slow, bogged-down conflict that would wear away at public opinion and political will. Unfortunately, President Johnson never developed a vision beyond attempting to avoid the embarrassment of a perceived loss to such a small country, and so his policy was to keep increasing the military presence in Vietnam without developing a goal for the end of that conflict, or a defining purpose that the United States was accomplishing with all of its military involvement. His desire to avoid humiliation and embarrassment appears to have been his sole motivation, and as such the military effort foundered without a central purpose or focus. Works Cited Barron, John and Anthony Paul, Murder of a Gentle Land: the untold story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia. NY: Reader's Digest, 1977. John G. Hubbell, P.O.W.: A Definitive History of the American Prisoner-of-War Experience in Vietnam, 1964-1973. New York: Reader's Digest Press, 1976. xiii, 633 pp. Louis R. Stockstill, The Forgotten Americans of the Vietnam War, October 1969, Vol. 52, No. 10. Accessed 2nd June, 2007 Read More