How is everyone doing? I hope you are feeling good about your research and are ready to share your I-Search progress with us later this week! This week, Week 14, we only have one module to complete, to allow for extra time you might need to finish up your I-Search papers.
Module 25 will focus on the Vietnam War. In Part I, we’ll establish the context and history of US involvement in Vietnam. Then, we’ll move to examine the experiences of soldiers and veterans in the context of the social movements we examined in Module 24. (I sandwiched Vietnam between the social movements modules Part I and Part II for a reason--the war in Vietnam needs to be analyzed in the context of the widespread social and cultural unrest in the 1960s and 1970s.)
Content Note: This module blog post contains disturbing images of news coverage of the Vietnam War.
Three questions will guide this module blog post:
What was the nature of the war in Vietnam and why was the US there?
What were the experiences of soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War?
How did citizens critique the Vietnam War?
Let's get started!
Part I: History of US Involvement in Vietnam
Polls 1 & 2:
To start, a poll question. In 1988, Ronald Reagan made a Veterans’ Day speech at the Vietnam War Memorial. He spoke of the veterans of the Vietnam War, stating,
“Most of all, we remember the devotion and gallantry with which all of them ennobled their nation as they became champions of a noble cause.”
Poll #1
In 2020, do you think we remember the Vietnam War as a "noble cause"? Answer in the embedded poll below or access it here.
Poll #2
Do we remember veterans of the Vietnam War for their "devotion and gallantry"? Answer in the embedded poll below or access it here.
History of US Involvement in Vietnam
After WWII, France lost control of what was then known as “French Indochina” (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). The nationalist and communist leader Ho Chi Minh and his army (the Viet Minh) had taken control of the former colony. This prompted the US to panic, as they had made it their mission to “contain” the spread of communism. Vietnam’s proximity to China, which by 1949 had also become communist, fed into this panic.
By the early 1950s, under the Truman administration, the US had begun funneling billions of dollars into the French effort against the Vietnamese.
By 1953, the US had accounted for 80 percent of the French war budget for Indochina. In 1954, France was ultimately defeated by the Viet Minh.
In 1954, the French met with Ho Chi Minh and came to an agreement known as the Geneva Accords. This agreement stipulated that French Indochina would be split into Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam and that Vietnam will be divided at the 17th parallel. The country would be reunited in 1956 under a general election. However, the US was sure that Ho Chi Minh would win a national election. They refused to sign the Geneva Accords and instead backed Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic Vietnamese immigrant living in a seminary in New York. Diem acted as the leader of South Vietnam, and ran a corrupt government that was based on bribery, imprisonment of his enemies, and the backing of the US. [1]
In 1958, a civil war against Diem erupted in Vietnam. Communists organized the National Liberation Front in 1960 to lead the rebellion. President Kennedy was determined to intervene militarily in Vietnam, especially after several Buddhist monks burned themselves alive in protest of the fact that Diem, a Catholic, had banned their demonstrations in celebration of Buddha’s birthday.
In 1963, Diem was assassinated in a military coup and President Kennedy was assassinated.
President Johnson was faced with a decision about what to do, and decided to commit to the containment of communism in Vietnam. In 1964, Johnson announced that two American destroyers had been attacked in international waters (the Gulf of Tonkin) by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. He ordered air strikes on North Vietnam’s naval base, and urged Congress to pass a broad resolution (the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) giving him the authority to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” Later, it was revealed that this attack never actually occurred. [2]
Between 1964 and 1966, young men were recruited into the US military and sent to Southeast Asia. Initial support for the war was high, as Americans believed that communism must be contained. After communists killed seven Americans at a base in South Vietnam, Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam in order to cut off supplies flowing south to the NLF of South Vietnam. Johnson then started a buildup of US troops.
For the next seven years, bombing continued. More bombs were dropped on Vietnam than on Germany, Japan, and their Axis allies combined during WWII.
Historian Marilyn Young, asserts that, “For the US military, Vietnam became a laboratory in which weapons and “weapons systems” could be battlefield-tested.” This includes the use of chemical agents such as Agent Orange and Napalm. The US believed that their technological prowess would ensure victory, mainly because they were fighting an enemy who used guerrilla warfare, armed with old rifles and homemade grenades. [3]
Throughout 1967, the bombing did not prevent the North Vietnamese from doubling their army in South Vietnam. The buildup on both sides essentially changed the war from a civil war between North and South to a war between the US and North Vietnam. American forces did not acknowledge that Vietnam was one country, and that the war in the South between the contending Vietnamese forces had in large measure been created by the US itself. [4]
On January 30, 1968, the Lunar New Year holiday, the Viet Minh (the government in charge of North Vietnam) and the Viet Cong (the communist insurgent army originating in South Vietnam) conducted a massive urban act of war against South Vietnam and the US, known as the Tet Offensive.
The Tet Offensive resulted in a devastating attack and seizure of vital portions of South Vietnam. The army requested even more American troops to come to the war.
Images of the War at Home
By this time, public opinion on the war had shifted. Images of the war were televised, and people were shocked and disgusted at what they saw. Just a month and a half after the Tet Offensive, the US and the South Vietnamese troops were scrambling. Three companies of US troops were ordered to enter villages in South Vietnam and kill everyone in sight. In what is known as the My Lai Massacre, over 350 South Vietnamese citizens (men, women, and children) were killed by US army troops. The grotesque images of this massacre were broadcast to the American public, leading more and more of them to ask why we were there, committing these atrocities. (The JSTOR Daily article linked here is a required reading for Module 25.)
Scholars have shown that the My Lai Massacre wasn’t an isolated event, but that the indiscriminate killing of South Vietnamese noncombatants was part of the way the US conducted this war of “overkill.” [5]
Crucially, soldiers were unable to tell who was friend and who was foe, and weren’t willing to take the risk to try to do so, simply deciding to fire on anyone they saw, with the support or on orders from superiors.
The following images are some of the most jarring and significant to come out of the news coverage of the war. Images like these came into American homes through newspaper and television coverage. Content Note: These images are disturbing.
Image 1: General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shoots an unarmed Viet Cong prisoner during the Tet Offensive, 1968. This image is discussed in more detail in the JSTOR Daily article assigned for this module.
Image 2: A group of Vietnamese women and children, before the My Lai Massacre. The most well-known image of the My Lai Massacre can be viewed here (with caution).
Image 3: Nick Ut's Pulitzer Prize winning photo of Phan Thi Kim Phúc, known as "Napalm Girl." For more on Kim Phúc's story and her experiences since this photo was taken, check out this article.
Word Cloud #1:
We’ve examined the use of visual images in a variety of conflicts and events in the twentieth century. For example, in WWII, visual propaganda was used to rally Americans behind the war effort. In the Vietnam War, images from the front seemed to have the opposite effect. Televised coverage of the civil rights movement—especially violent responses to nonviolent protestors—also had a significant effect on shaping American opinions about racial tension and conflict. Why are images so effective in shaping popular opinion? Enter a response in the word cloud below, or access it here.
Nixon and Vietnam
In 1968, Johnson decided not to run for president again, largely as a result of the antiwar sentiment that swept the nation. Republican Richard Nixon was elected partly on his promise to end the war. His policy of “Vietnamization” would supposedly reduce the amount of American troops on the ground in Vietnam, but provide military equipment to South Vietnam so they could fight their own war.
By early 1970, it was clear that the policy had failed. As American troops left, the South Vietnamese could not drive out communist forces alone.
Nixon ended up escalating US involvement by invading neighboring Cambodia in order to destroy communist bases there. The response of American anti-war protesters was electric.
The Senate repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, but Nixon claimed he could continue to fight in Southeast Asia, regardless of what Congress did, in order to protect American troops already in Vietnam.
In 1971, Nixon ordered the invasion of Laos by South Vietnamese troops.
In 1973, the US finally decided to call a cease fire and started to withdraw troops. In 1975, North and South Vietnam were reunified when the National Liberation Front captured Saigon. The video below is footage from the CBS Evening News coverage of the evacuation of Saigon in 1975.
Part II: Experiences of Soldiers and Veterans
In Part II, we’ll turn to an examination of some of the specific experiences of American soldiers and veterans.
Race and the Vietnam War
In basic training, drafted soldiers were instructed to direct their hostilities towards the Vietnamese enemy, referred to as “gooks.” The “gook” caricature was one that stripped Vietnamese of their humanity, making it more justifiable to kill them. We saw this sort of caricature in WWII against the Japanese. In the Vietnam War, the “enemy” was seen as particularly treacherous, because it was impossible for American soldiers to tell who they were.
Stories circulated throughout the military about how no Vietnamese could be trusted, all were dangerous. Rumors about Vietnamese barbers who slit American throats and sodas and beers which had been adulterated with tiny pieces of glass by Viet Cong to sell to thirsty Americans contributed to an environment of distrust, which had disastrous implications for the Vietnamese people.
Some Americans believed that if no Vietnamese could be trusted, the safest response was for the US to eliminate as many Vietnamese as possible, indiscriminately. One American soldier remembered his instructor saying to him during in-country training: “The only good gook is a dead gook, and the more gooks you can kill, the more slant-eyes you can kill in Vietnam, that is the less you will have to worry about them killing you at night.” [6]
Asian American soldiers in the US military were also subject to racialized treatment. Because they supposedly “looked like the enemy,” they often faced racial harassment in their units. While in training, some were ordered to wear straw hats and loose clothing, placed in front of their fellow soldiers and used as an example of “what the enemy looked like.” The army even constructed a mock “Southeast Asian type village” called “Kara Village” on O’ahu to prepare soldiers for the types of operations they would face in Vietnam. Members of Hawai’i’s National Guard, made up of mainly Native Hawaiian and Asian Americans from Hawaii would “perform” the roles of both Vietnamese villagers and Viet Cong. [7]
Many Asian Americans who served in the Vietnam War reported that they experienced race-related encounters, at times being mistaken for Vietnamese and treated as such by their fellow soldiers. While in combat, many had to find a white friend to vouch for them as part of the unit.
One long-range reconnaissance Special Forces team, “Team Hawaii,” composed of Japanese American, Chinese American, Filipino, and Native American Army Rangers who could pass for Vietnamese, were tasked with infiltrating enemy lines and gathering information. The high bounties placed on their heads by Viet Cong demonstrate how successful they were.
"Working-Class War"
2.5 million young American men served in Vietnam. The Vietnam War has been called a “working class war” by historians for several reasons. Working-class men were more likely to be drafted, while their wealthier peers were more likely to attend college. (Because of the class bias, the number of people of color drafted into the military was also disproportionate.) You could be exempted from the draft if you were attending college. If you went on to grad school you were also immune. Those who were trained as engineers, scientists, or teachers could then acquire occupational deferments. In working-class communities, where college was not as expected of young people, avoiding the draft was harder. [8]
Furthermore, in many working-class neighborhoods, military service after high school was commonplace among young men—not necessarily welcomed by everyone, but rarely questioned. In addition, poor and working-class soldiers, black or white, were more likely to be trained for combat than were soldiers economically and educationally more advantaged.
The average age of Vietnam War volunteers and draftees was nineteen. By contrast, the average age of the American soldier in WWII was 26. Thus, most of the Americans who fought in Vietnam were working-class teenagers.
Despite what they had been told about their mission in Vietnam, American soldiers did not see themselves as “liberators.” Rather, they found that their search-and-destroy missions did more to promote anti-Americanism than anticommunism. American soldiers did not believe that the Vietnamese were eager to fight communism. In fact, many soldiers came to believe that the war itself had no meaningful purpose. [9]
In the context of the growing anti-war movement, soldiers were even more discouraged. They took the protests as personal affronts, and viewed them through a class lens. Because most Vietnam War soldiers were working class, they viewed the middle-class college students as people who perceived themselves as intellectually and morally superior. [10]
Veterans who returned home to protesting felt defensive and angry. They were torn with confusion about the war they had fought, struggling to feel some pride in what they had done, and faced with people so sure the war was wrong. Most people in the anti-war movement did not hate veterans or directly abuse them. However, many veterans felt that their own morality was under siege.
Even without the presence of an organized anti-war movement, veterans returning from Vietnam would have felt isolated and lost. Society as a whole was unable to provide these men with the support and understanding they needed. For many, the war was frustrating, confusing, and morally wrenching, and they would have had postwar problems regardless of the homecoming they received.
Poll #3:
In your opinion, were Vietnam War veterans justified in feeling defensive and angry towards anti-war protestors? Answer in the embedded poll below, or access it here.
Part III: Anti-War Protest
Opposition to the Vietnam War was widespread. Civil rights and student activists spoke out about the war. Many of the social movements we’ve already examined also had anti-war platforms. In Part III, we’ll look at some key examples of anti-war protest.
Activists protested the war for several key reasons:
They argued that violence and atrocities in Vietnam were conducted in the name of US imperialism, furthering US geopolitical dominance through conquest.
They protested against the death of American soldiers, who were disproportionately working-class and people of color.
They promoted a sense of solidarity with Vietnamese who were fighting for self-determination.
In a 1967 speech, Martin Luther King condemned the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policy as an unconscionable use of violence and a drain on resources from needs at home. Critiquing Johnson’s two legacies, the War on Poverty and the Vietnam War, King argued:
“Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”
Later, in the same speech, he asserted:
“So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”
The anti-war movement gained momentum in the late 1960s. In 1965, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized opponents of American policy in Vietnam to assemble in Washington DC and 25,000 came to protest the war. By 1967, young men were burning their draft cards or fleeing to Canada to avoid fighting in what they believed was an unjust war. Also in 1967, 100,000 protestors assembled at the Lincoln Memorial, many marching across the river to the Pentagon.
Chicano Movement and the Vietnam War
Although the anti-war movement is often remembered as mainly white, many nonwhite groups found solidarity with the Vietnamese. For example, activists in the Chicano movement saw the Vietnamese as another group which had been colonized by the US. Elizabeth Martinez wrote about the Vietnamese as fellow “campesinos” or peasants, emphasizing their similarity to the rural New Mexico readers of the newspaper she edited, El Grito del Norte. [11]
Chicanos in the antiwar movement often utilized the phrase, “the battle is here,” to articulate their opposition to the war. They argued that “the barrios are our Vietnam,” where resources should be put. Black Power activists articulated similar visions, arguing that men should refuse the draft and stay and fight for their own communities.
In 1970, the National Chicano Moratorium Committee organized a large antiwar march in Los Angeles. Over 30,000 protestors were mobilized. They marched peacefully down Whittier Boulevard, ending at a rally in Laguna Park.
There, hundreds of riot gear equipped sheriffs and police officers charged into the park, after an earlier confrontation at a liquor store a few blocks away with marchers. The celebration turned into a riot that spilled out into the city. Ultimately, three people died as a result of the day’s violence, including Los Angeles Times reporter Ruben Salazar. The police response to the protest served to reemphasize to the protestors that their battle was at home, not in Vietnam.
Asian American Activism and the Vietnam War
Asian Americans also became particularly politicized over the Vietnam War. They understood the war as not just imperialist, but also anti-Asian. We examined the racialized experiences of Asian American soldiers. These types of experiences encouraged Asian Americans to see themselves and the Vietnamese as part of the same group—both victims of US imperialism. Asian American women in particular saw a bond between themselves and Vietnamese women.
The US military systematically portrayed Vietnamese women as prostitutes as a way of dehumanizing them. This conditioned GIs to see all Asian women as subservient and hyper sexual (this stereotype goes back a long way in American popular culture).
Women in the Asian American antiwar movement stressed the connections between sexism and racism. Some idealized, or even romanticized the figure of the courageous Vietnamese woman freedom fighter. Understanding Vietnamese women as fellow Asians enabled Asian American women to see their own antiwar activities as an extension of the actions of Vietnamese women fighting in Vietnam. Therefore, antiwar activism functioned as a way for them to critique sexism within their own movement, communities, and in the US at large. [12]
Activism on College Campuses
As the war escalated, protests spread through college campuses. After Nixon announced he was invading Cambodia, at Kent State University, four protestors were killed by the Ohio National Guard at an antiwar rally, and at Jackson State University in Mississippi, two were killed by police. In the spring of 1970, more than 350 colleges and universities experienced strikes, and troops occupied 21 campuses.
Watch the following clip from Herbert’s Hippopotamus, a documentary about the activism of philosopher Herbert Marcuse, a professor at UCSD during the Vietnam War era. In this clip, you’ll hear about one UCSD student, George Winne, who burned himself alive on campus in protest of the war. You’ll also see some interesting original footage of protests from the 1970s. (Watch only from 20:00 minutes - 24:00 minutes.)
Poll #4:
In your opinion, which of the following aspects of Johnson’s presidency was more significant for the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s? The War on Poverty? Or the Vietnam War? Answer in the embedded poll below, or access it here.
Conclusion:
The US entered the war in Vietnam in order to combat the spread of communism. Although the US viewed the conflict as a civil war between North and South Vietnam, in reality, the war was fought between the US and Vietnamese people. The conflict was extremely violent and resulted in millions of civilian casualties, as US soldiers were dealing with an enemy that wasn’t clearly defined.
Soldiers in Vietnam were mostly working-class. Drafted into the war, they found themselves conflicted about their role, and the reception they received at home.
Anti-war protestors critiqued the war in Vietnam as an example of US imperialism, a waste of resources, and as one more part of the larger 1960s-1970s freedom struggle.
Citations:
[1] For more context on the US' role in international diplomacy post-WWII and American involvement in Vietnam, see Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
[2] Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991), 160.
[3] Young, The Vietnam Wars, 191.
[4] Young, The Vietnam Wars, 179.
[5] Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2013), 107.
[6] For much more on racialization and stereotyping of Vietnamese people, see Simeon Man, Soldiering Through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 135-161.
[7] Man, Soldiering Through Empire, 89-91.
[8] See Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill; London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
[9] Appy, Working-Class War, 208.
[10] Appy, Working-Class War, 220-221.
[11] Lorena Oropeza, Raza Si! Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 98-100.
[12] See Lon Kurashige and Alice Yang Murray, eds. Major Problems in Asian American History: Documents and Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), 425-426.
Images, while today we see them as fun, interesting, or even easily faked images. Back in this time period photography was raw and was used to capture things as they are seen. To see death, pain, and horror captured in a tiny picture. It would hit us deeply as they would be images that are not so commonly seen by everyday citizens. To feel wronged at seeing children, and women being hurt by their country. Americans are becoming more consciously aware of the suffering of others over time. The films and pictures are no longer just tools for rallying support for wars, they serve to reveal the brutal and sad truths of war.
In your opinion, in 2020, do we remember the Vietnam War as a "noble cause"?
I said no because I would think that most people thought that the US going into Vietnam was wrong and unneeded.
Reading these comments and thinking about the power of images and the way we remember (or don't remember) the war as a "noble cause," and whether Vietnam veterans were justified in feeling defensive towards protestors. The way we remember Vietnam is very different from the way we remember other 20th century conflicts. I think it has a lot to do with the images that came out of this conflict. It is hard to forget a lot of those images, especially the ones depicting the aftermath of chemical weapons attacks and events like the My Lai massacre.
Thanks for all of your comments everyone!
Why are images so effective in shaping popular opinion?
Images can show a visual idea more than words. This attracts people's attention and provides more content. Images show us reality especially those in the Vitnam war.
Why are images so effective in shaping popular opinion?
Was able to show the people back home what our government was actually doing fighting these wars. People had this knowledge to themselves to shape a different understanding.