American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  In late 1964 and early 1965, the communist forces in the south grew increasingly bold. In November 1964 and again in February 1965, they attacked American air bases, destroying planes and killing servicemen. The first raid came shortly before the presidential election, and Johnson declined to respond. But after the second attack he ordered retaliatory airstrikes against North Vietnam that soon turned into an ongoing campaign of bombing. That in turn led to the first deployment of U.S. combat troops in Vietnam (in addition to the twenty thousand advisers and support personnel already there), thirty-five hundred Marines sent to defend the Da Nang air base in March 1965. The next month the president authorized the deployment of additional troops and their use in offensive operations, not just base security (a changed role not publicly acknowledged until later). In June he ordered still more combat units to Vietnam, part of what would be a four-year escalation of troop strength, which reached 184,000 at the end of 1965, 385,000 at the end of 1966, and 486,000 at the end of 1967, peaking in 1969 at over 543,000. With the escalation, the U.S. military largely displaced the South Vietnamese army (the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, or ARVN) as the main force fighting against the communists and their allies.

  The United States already had the infrastructure for large-scale overseas combat in place. Its Pacific fleet was the largest naval force in the world. Its army and other military services had been bolstered by a huge buildup undertaken by the Kennedy administration, designed in part so that the president would have military options other than the use of nuclear weapons or airpower alone for situations like Vietnam. For manpower, the Johnson administration could depend on the system of military conscription already woven into the fabric of American life. For logistics, it had major supply bases available in Okinawa, the Philippines, and Japan as an inheritance of World War II and the Cold War. Two decades of militarism and imperial planning made the path to war in Vietnam an easy one to take.

  Explaining it was harder. The Johnson administration had difficulty articulating a reason for going to full-scale war to the public and even to itself. It rang hollow to portray the war as a defense of freedom, since after the overthrow of Diem one coup after another had brought a series of military governments to power, none democratic. Johnson sometimes stressed the domino theory, arguing that the fall of South Vietnam would inevitably bring the communists to the shores of Hawaii or even the West Coast, but an aura of implausibility surrounded such claims about a war in a small country so distant from the United States. Occasionally, as in an April 1965 speech justifying the air attacks against North Vietnam, he defended the war in explicitly New Deal terms, as a prerequisite for schools, dams, electrification, economic development, and improved medical care in Southeast Asia, for programs like the TVA and the Rural Electrification Administration that had transformed the countryside in which he himself had been born. But above all, administration leaders stressed to themselves and others the need to check the influence of China, whose foreign policy intentions and role in Vietnam they completely misunderstood (wrongly believing that it effectively controlled the Vietnamese communists), and the need to maintain the credibility of the United States in carrying out its commitments. The latter argument carried ever greater weight the longer the war went on and the higher pledges to win it piled up. Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton captured the thinking of many policymakers in a memo he prepared for Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in March 1965, describing the U.S. aims in Vietnam as “70%—To avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor). 20%—To keep SVN [South Vietnam] (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands. 10%—To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.”

  How the United States Fought

  As the United States took over the bulk of combat in Vietnam, a strategy of conventional war and victory through attrition displaced an earlier approach of sociopolitical counterinsurgency, which had not proved very effective. American military commanders believed that the war could be won by killing communist troops and their supporters faster than they could be replaced. Rather than trying to capture and hold specific territory, they concentrated on seeking out the enemy forces and engaging them in battles that allowed them to bring to bear the enormous U.S. advantage in firepower, in many cases then retreating from ground gained. The measure of success became the number of enemy soldiers killed, the “body count,” rather than the movement of a line of battle, as in earlier wars. In areas that were deemed under NLF control, U.S. forces often did not even bother identifying specific targets, engaging instead in indiscriminate bombing, use of chemical agents, and aerial strafing. In contested rural areas, the United States and the South Vietnamese government, having failed to woo the population to their side through a reform program or by providing effective security, tried to destroy the NLF infrastructure through “Operation Phoenix,” a program of arrests, detention without trial, and, in some cases, assassination. The United States also conducted a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam and parts of neighboring Laos and Cambodia, which American leaders believed would stop the flow of troops and supplies to the south, demoralize the North Vietnamese leadership, and increase the morale of the anticommunist forces. In this strategy of massive force, the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force competed with one another to get into action all their newest and most powerful weaponry, as a fantasia of destruction rained down on Indochina.

  For the most part, the American strategy failed. Operation Phoenix, ground combat, and bombing took a heavy toll on the communists and their supporters, but through local recruiting and a growing infiltration of replacements from the north, the communist forces proved able to maintain their strength. Rather than gaining control over the countryside, the main effect of the American effort was to depopulate it, as the civilian population fled to the cities to escape the bombing in the most rapid urbanization of a society in human history. (In 1964, only 20 percent of South Vietnamese lived in an urban area; by 1972, 65 percent.) Meanwhile, the communist forces continued to meet their relatively modest logistical needs through sea shipments and, in spite of constant bombing, an overland route through Laos and Cambodia, dubbed by the Americans the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  The communists could hold their own in part because they conducted war very differently from the United States. The American dependence on high technology, the thick bureaucracy of its military, and its desire to keep its soldiers in creature comforts required a huge logistical overhead. American airfields and bases, some gigantic, sprang up across South Vietnam. Troops had air-conditioned barracks, mess halls, movie theaters, bowling alleys, and post exchanges equipped like American department stores. The Army even set up forty small ice-cream-making plants. By contrast, the Vietnamese communist leadership in the south remained lean, headquartered in cave complexes (to survive bombing) or jungle camps. Some communist guerrillas operated near where they lived, while others tried to live off the local peasantry. Only late in the war did the communists begin using heavy equipment like tanks that required complex logistical support.

  The bizarre juxtaposition of American consumer culture and gruesome warfare required the United States to send a flood of arms and material into Vietnam, overwhelming its infrastructure. To alleviate the jam at the poorly equipped and corruptly run South Vietnamese ports, the American military undertook a crash construction program and eventually adopted container shipping, giving a boost to a technology that would transform world trade. Keeping the war going also required huge amounts of logistics, engineering, and supply personnel. During World War II, 39 percent of the U.S. military consisted of combat troops; in Vietnam, by 1967, just 14 percent. As a result, the communists could match the United States and the ARVN in combat troops, even though their overall military force in the south was only one-quarter the size.

  As the U.S. military effort escalated, its burden increasingly fell on the shoulders of working-class teenagers. Early in the war, the troo
ps tended to be volunteers, who in many cases went off to Vietnam with great esprit. But as the number of soldiers being sent into combat soared, draftees rose to make up roughly a third of the troops, while men who had enlisted because they expected to be drafted and hoped to get better assignments by volunteering made up another third. The increase in draftees led to a drop in the average age of the American deployment in Vietnam to just nineteen, in contrast to World War II, when it was twenty-six.

  Outside of the officer corps, very few of the ground troops came from the middle or upper classes. The post–World War II baby boom meant that the cohort of men coming of age during the Vietnam War far exceeded the manpower needs of the military. Between 1964 and 1973, only 40 percent of the men reaching the draft age of eighteen served in the military (in contrast to the mid-1950s, when 70 percent of draft-age men served), and only 10 percent went to Vietnam. The selective service system acted as a mechanism of class filtration. Until 1968, being in college or graduate school provided an exemption from the draft, which disproportionately benefited the middle and upper classes. Medical exemptions favored them too, in spite of the general correlation between wealth and health. Lower-class teenagers rarely had the wherewithal to get letters from doctors about infirmities—often rather minor—that led to medical exemptions. Occupational exemptions—which during World War II covered many blue-collar jobs—were largely restricted to positions filled by middle-class whites, like teaching, social work, and scientific occupations. Finally, joining the National Guard served as a protection policy for those who could get in, since only a small number of Guard or Reserve units were sent to Vietnam. Getting into the Guard or Reserve often required connections through family or college or politics, which in part explains why African Americans made up just 1 percent of the Guard. The cumulative effect of the system was to produce a military force far more working-class and less white than the population as a whole. Throughout American history, farmers, workers, and the poor bore a disproportionate load of the fighting in the nation’s wars, but the exceptional experience of World War II, when men of all classes and a broad age range served in the military, resonated in popular culture as a sharp contrast to the unrepresentative nature of the military in Vietnam.

  Political leaders worried about sustaining popular support for the war. Both Kennedy and Johnson fretted that if they did not stop the spread of communism in Indochina, they would be subjected to Republican and conservative attacks, much as the Democrats had been in the late 1940s and early 1950s over the communist triumph in China. In a May 1964 telephone conversation with Senator Richard Russell, Johnson mused that “they’d impeach a president . . . that would run out, wouldn’t they?” (Russell disagreed.) But Kennedy’s and Johnson’s actions reflected another, perhaps greater concern, that if the public had a clear understanding of the situation in Indochina, it would reject either the war or domestic reform during it. In the same conversation with Russell about the war, Johnson freely admitted, “I don’t think the American people are for it.” While occasionally calling for national dedication to shared sacrifice, Kennedy and Johnson avoided imposing any burden on the public, except the young men they sent off to fight. By waging the war with as little disruption of domestic life as possible, they hoped to maintain public support and keep the war from overwhelming their presidencies, a template that future presidents would use for their military actions.

  The most obvious effort to downplay the war was Johnson’s decision not to seek a declaration of war, avoiding an extended discussion of the implications of sending the military to Indochina. The Tonkin Gulf resolution, which at the time seemed like authorization for an immediate response to a specific incident, became the basis for years of large-scale combat. Both Congress and the Supreme Court proved complicit in Johnson’s maneuver, spurning challenges to the legality of the military effort. The decision not to deploy Reserve units in Vietnam was another attempt to avoid debate and opposition. Johnson also sought to avoid a public acknowledgment of the economic cost of the war, which might have led to cutbacks in Great Society spending and diminished public backing for the fighting. Johnson had the Defense Department present misleading information on Vietnam’s cost, and until 1967, when he unsuccessfully asked Congress for an income tax surcharge, he ignored advice from his economic advisers that without a tax increase the war would lead to inflation.

  Lying about the war, or at least giving the public misleading information, became routine. Johnson repeatedly hid or gave deceptive accounts of planned increases in troop strength. To justify the American intervention by portraying the Vietnamese conflict as an attack by North Vietnam against South Vietnam rather than as a civil war, his administration went as far as having the CIA create elaborate fake evidence of large-scale shipments of arms from the north to the south. Meanwhile, in Vietnam itself, military officials gave reporters misleading information, withholding anything that might bring into question official optimism.

  The government generated false optimism not only for popular consumption but internally as well. The nonterritoriality of the war made it difficult to judge who was winning and who was losing. Under McNamara, the Department of Defense adopted advanced managerial techniques, developed in academia and industry, to administer the war, using masses of data and quantitative analysis to measure success. Rather than leading to clarity, war by numbers often led to self-deception, as each level of officialdom falsely reported information they believed their superiors wanted. South Vietnamese officers told of patrols and firefights with guerrilla units that never took place. American commanders inflated the body counts after engagements, sometimes including civilian casualties. They also exaggerated the number of their soldiers in combat roles, while undercounting the number of communist combatants. The systematic dissemination of false information had many costs: it bred cynicism throughout the military, undercut esprit for actual warfare, led to decisions based on inaccurate perceptions of reality, and created false optimism that set the stage for later disillusionment.

  The Antiwar Movement

  Until the spring of 1965, the war in Vietnam did not provoke widespread debate within the United States. The 1963 Diem regime attacks on Buddhist protestors did spark criticism of U.S. policy from liberal journals, pacifists, foreign policy experts, and civil rights leaders. But the overthrow of Diem and Johnson’s campaign pledge the following year that “we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves” defused the issue.

  The bombing campaign against North Vietnam and the introduction of American combat troops ended the silence. The first to mobilize were liberal college faculty, many of whom had supported Johnson in the recent election. At the University of Michigan, a group of professors sponsored a “teach-in” on the war. (The term, with its echo of “sit-in,” reflected the pervasive influence that the civil rights movement had had on politics.) Three thousand students showed up at the combination information session, debate, and protest. Soon teach-ins were being held at scores of colleges, sometimes with representatives of the Johnson administration present to defend its policies.

  As the military campaign escalated, so did protests against it. Antiwar activists gathered signatures on petitions, took out newspaper ads, and put referenda on local ballots. Large-scale demonstrations, held mostly in Washington, New York, and San Francisco, became semiannual affairs. The first major antiwar demonstration, held in April 1965, drew twenty thousand people to Washington, a small gathering compared to some civil rights demonstrations of the recent past but the largest antiwar protest in the country’s history. Two years later, a protest march in New York attracted ten times the number of protestors, while a simultaneous gathering in San Francisco brought out over fifty thousand more.

  Opponents of the war soon began engaging in civil disobedience. In October 1965, thousands of protestors tried to block access to the Army Terminal in Oaklan
d, California. A small but growing number of draft-eligible men publicly declared that they would refuse to serve in the armed services, in some cases burning the cards that all draft-age men had to carry.

  The antiwar movement had no central organization, nor a shared political line. Some groups called for negotiations with the communist forces, while others insisted on an immediate bombing halt or a complete U.S. withdrawal. A few openly supported the NLF. College students played a large role in the movement, but professionals, unionists, women, and the religiously devout formed antiwar groups too. When in 1966 Robert McNamara went to Harvard to participate in meetings with students and faculty, he found himself trapped by antiwar students who blocked his car, forcing him to answer questions posed by a leader of SDS. A year later, his son, a prep school student, became so distressed by his father’s role in the pursuit of the war that he hung an NLF flag on his bedroom wall.

  Though highly visible, the antiwar movement constituted an activist minority. In the early years of the military buildup, most of the public did not oppose the war, and most who did took no part in protest activity. Antiwar protests did little to change the course of government policy; troop levels, draft calls, and combat deaths continued to move upward. What the protests did do was accelerate a social and cultural transformation of the country.