In the late '60s, when I was in high school, the nightly news carried story after story about the state of the war in Vietnam and the discussion, debate and protest raging at home. It seemed that we were not lacking for information about what was going on. As I later learned, there was a whole lot more to that war than what we were told by our government and its mouthpieces. The "official" story was pure propaganda told to confuse us as to what was really happening over there. The real story was quite different.
The Vietnamese people have been fighting against outside invaders long before the United States was even a country. Around 1000 AD, the Chinese invaded Vietnam and although it took fifty years, the Vietnamese people drove them from their country. 300 years later, the Mongolian ruler Kubla Khan sent 500,000 soldiers to take Vietnam, and failed as well. In 1859, the French and Spanish invaded Vietnam and spent the better part of the next century trying to maintain control of the country. Throughout all of this, the Vietnamese people never gave up fighting for their independence.
In 1939, Socialists, Communists, liberals, and many other political and religious groups came together to form the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh-the League for the Independence of Vietnam-or "Vietminh" for short. When the Japanese began their expansionist push through Southeast Asia, the French spent their time fighting the Vietminh instead of the Japanese, allowing Japan to conquer the country. This was in spite of the offer of the Vietminh to join the French in fighting the Japanese invaders.
During World War II, the Vietminh, under the leadership of a man named Nguyen Van Thanh-also known as Ho Chi Minh, lead the Vietnamese people in an underground struggle against both the French and the Japanese. In 1945 when the Japanese surrendered, the French were nowhere to be found and the Vietminh formed the government of the Republic of Vietnam and elected Ho Chi Minh as its president. The Vietnamese Declaration of Independence begins with words that sound very familiar:
All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. 1
However, to the victors go the spoils and the Big Three, Stalin, Churchill and Truman, met at Potsdam, Germany, to divide up the world. England got all of Southeast Asia and to appease China, they cut Vietnam in two at the 16th parallel with the north going to China and the south going to England. China immediately recognized the government of the Republic of Vietnam. England had other plans. It immediately set about overthrowing the Vietnamese government in the south and restoring the French to power. The French, using Japanese troops, occupied Saigon and began re-conquering the countryside. With their puppet, Bao Dai, in place, the French now recognized the "right" of Vietnam to be unified under one government-theirs.
The French attacked Hanoi and for eight years, they tried to break the resistance of the Vietnamese people and failed. During this time, the U.S. bankrolled most of the war, providing the French with both supplies and weapons. But by 1954, the French were defeated and the United States was forced to become openly involved. This is how the U.S. has done its dirty work over the years. It tries to start out covertly supporting a puppet regime or dictator who is willing to front for U.S. interests. When that doesn't work, or isn't possible, it then gets directly involved.
At the Geneva Convention of 1954, France and the Republic of Vietnam agreed to the following conditions: all fighting would stop; no more troops and weapons would be sent to Vietnam; no revenge against people of either side; the country would be temporarily divided at the 17th parallel; and that general elections would be held in 1956 to unify Vietnam. While the U.S. said that it would abide by the agreement, it set about ensuring its failure. "Although Vietnam was halved, Ho Chi Minh held effective sway over about two-thirds of the country. Largely because of American fears of a communist victory at the ballot box, the 1956 elections never took place...With the assurance of U.S. material and political support, [Ngo Dinh] Diem was installed in Saigon in 1954 as the leader of the anticommunist South."2 The U.S. set up an operation called MAAG (Military Assistance Advisory Group) whose purpose was to ship advisors and weapons to Diem's regime in direct violation of the Geneva agreement. The way that the U.S. chose to portray the agreement was that it was to guarantee the independence of south Vietnam-their whole reason for escalating their involvement. This was a straight-up lie used by the government and military to keep the U.S. people in the dark as to the true nature of the involvement.
But Diem's troops were no more successful than the French had been earlier. By 1961, U.S. politicians were nervous about Diem's losses. In an attempt to turn the tide, Maxwell Taylor, a general, and Eugene Stanley, a professor, came up with a plan called the "Special War." The Taylor/Stanley plan was supposed to be the latest in counterinsurgency techniques to be used against communist liberation movements. It called for beefing up the Saigon Army (ARVN), putting whole villages into "strategic hamlets" (actually concentration camps with barbed wire, trenches and blockhouses), and infiltrating the North with sabotage raids.
By 1965, the Special War had failed. With the ARVN unable to function, the United States decide to send in its own troops to do its dirty work. "In March 1965, some 3,500 U.S. Marines went ashore at Red Beach near Da Nang, and in May about 3,500 men of the U.S. Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade, stationed at Okinawa, were brought to the Bien Hoa air base, northwest of Saigon, and to the base at Vung Tau, on the coast. By the end of that year, there were 184,300 U.S. troops in the country-and the Vietnam conflict had turned into a 'big battalion' war."3 However, the U.S. troops were no more effective against the People's War than the ARVN and the Special War had been. General Westmoreland was forced to call for more and more troops-200,000, 300,000, finally half a million U.S. troops were in Vietnam and still he didn't have enough.
The U.S. offensive ended two years after it had begun with the defeat of Operation Junction City, in 1967. It was a grand plan to trap and destroy the regular armies of the NLF. Instead, guerrillas harassed, cut off, and beat back the U.S. army, causing casualties numbering 10,000 troops, 1,000 military vehicles destroyed and 100 aircraft shot down from the sky. The U.S.'s strategy from this point on was called "Clear and Hold," a fancy name for digging in and trying to keep from getting your ass blown off. But as history has shown, they had already lost the war-it was the beginning of the end.