Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995
Page 1
Contents
Prefac
Prologue: LBJ and Vietnam
1 Eternal War: The Vietnamese Heritage
2 The First Indochina War, 1945–1954
3 The Making of a Quagmire, 1954–1960
4 The New Frontier in Vietnam, 1961–1963
5 Planning a Tragedy, 1963–1965
6 Into the Abyss, 1965–1966
7 The Mirage of Progress, 1966–1967
8 Tet and the Year of the Monkey, 1968
9 The Beginning of the End, 1969–1970
10 The Fall of South Vietnam, 1970–1975
11 Distorted Images, Missed Opportunities, 1975–1995
12 Oliver Stone’s Vietnam
Bibliography
A Vietnam War Chronology
Glossary and Guide to Acronyms
Index
Maps
© 2008 by James S. Olson and Randy Roberts
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Fifth edition published 2006 by Brandywine Press as Where the Domino Fell:
America and Vietnam 1945–2006
Revised edition published 2008 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
3 2009
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Olson, James Stuart, 1946–Where the domino fell: America and Vietnam, 1945–1995/James S. Olson, Randy Robert. — Rev. 5th ed.
p. cm.
Previously published: Brandywine Press, c2006. 5th ed.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-8222-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—United States.
2. Vietnam—History—1945–1975. 3. Vietnam—History—1975– 4. Vietnam—Foreign
relations—United States. 5. United States—Foreign relations—Vietnam. I. Roberts,
Randy, 1951– II. Title.
DS558.O45 2008
959.704′3373—dc22 2007043410
Preface
The earliest Rambo movie could almost be taken as an antiwar film. Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo in First Blood is a troubled Vietnam veteran hunted by backwater police and gun wielders of a type ordinarily identified with blood-hungry patriotism. If that is the message, the producers of the Rambo movies apparently later changed their focus. In his return to the screen, Rambo is a vehicle for hyperpatriotic fantasies, a muscled and fearless avenger of freedom against Vietnamese Communists, Soviet invaders of Vietnam, and surely any other enemies of the American Way. The introspection that makes its tentative, half-articulate presence in First Blood gives way to a dreamscope of retaliation and triumph.
John Rambo as Stallone plays him is a contradictory symbol of what Americans frustrated by their country’s failure in Vietnam think should have been done there. The more massive deployment of force that they are convinced could have achieved victory would be technological. But Rambo pits brain and sinew against the superior fire-power of his enemies; he is our Vietcong guerrilla. That confusion of image, coupled with the half-start in First Blood toward a quite different sensibility about the Vietnam experience, suggests the difficulty that Americans have had in getting a clear grasp not only of the war itself but of their feelings about it.
That, so we hope to show throughout this book, had been the trouble from the beginning. War is, above all else, a political event. Wars are won only when political goals are achieved. Troops and weapons are—like diplomacy and money—essentially tools to achieve political objectives. The United States went into Indochina after World War II with muddled political objectives. It departed in 1975 after a thirty-year effort with political perceptions as blurred as they had been in the beginning. The war was unwinnable because the United States never decided what it was trying to achieve politically.
We are grateful to the reference librarians at Sam Houston State University and Purdue University for their assistance. We appreciate the help of Louise Waller and Lynnette Blevins. We would also like to thank these reviewers who offered useful comments: Truman R Clark, Tomball College; Anthony O. Edmonds, Ball State University; Ben F. Fordney, James Madison University; Katherine K. Reist, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown; and Clifford H. Scott, Indiana University—Purdue University at Fort Wayne. We are indebted to the hundreds of students in our Vietnam War classes who have helped us shape our own ideas about the war.
James S. Olson
Randy Roberts
Prologue: LBJ and Vietnam
On November 22, 1963, as his plane taxied down the runway at Andrews Air Force Base, President Lyndon B. Johnson could have counted up the days in his head. President John F. Kennedy had died only a few hours before. The assassination fulfilled Johnson’s lifelong dream to become president of the United States, but in his heart sadness competed with ambition. The presidential election of 1964 was less than a year away, and the Twenty-Second Amendment allowed him to run in his own right, legitimize his presidency, and then seek re-election in 1968. If he astutely shuffled the deck of Washington politics, he could live in the White House until January 21, 1973, not quite the thirteen-year reign of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but long enough to distinguish him in history. Lest he appear inappropriately political, Johnson kept a low profile while the nation mourned Camelot.
On January 1, 1964, however, Johnson greeted the new year with relief and confidence, or perhaps hubris, possessed only by anyone out to change the world. With JFK interred at Arlington National Cemetery, the eternal flame already burning over his grave, and the horrific events of November 1963 receding somewhat into the past, the president finally could think, and talk, about the future. Desperate for approval and obsessed with his place in history, he yearned to join the ranks of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom historians universally regarded as the nation’s greatest presidents. On the foundation of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal, he intended to build the Great Society, where prosperity replaced poverty and tolerance quenched the fires of racism. He began mulling around what would become the War on Poverty, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Had Vietnam not spun out of control, Johnson might have joined the pantheon of greatness, but Indochina and its miseries would steadily crowd out any good he achieved.
Early in February 1964, just three months in office, the president ordered t
he withdrawal from Vietnam of all American dependents. The Vietcong threatened Americans there, and the country was not secure. The United States had nearly 15,000 troops in South Vietnam, but the Vietcong, or “Charlie” as they became to be known, controlled the countryside and the night. Worse is that North Vietnamese regular soldiers were infiltrating South Vietnam. In Saigon, rebellions and coups created a musical-chairs government providing abundant fodder for political satirists and ambitious Republicans.
Already worrying that foreign affairs, in which Johnson had little interest, were distracting Americans from more important tasks, the president turned to his closest advisors. On March 2, 1964, after another coup d’etat in Saigon, Johnson met in the Oval Office with his aide McGeorge Bundy. “There may be another coup, but I don’t know what we can do,” the president complained. “If there is, I guess that we just . . . what alternatives do we have then? We’re not going to send our troops there, are we?” Two months later, Johnson learned that 20,000 Vietnamese, many of them civilian victims of American firepower, had died in 1963, compared to 5,000 in 1962. Calling on Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, he asked whether he should go public with the news. “I do think, Mr. President,” McNamara replied, “that it would be wise for you to say as little as possible [about the war]. The frank answer is we don’t know what’s going on out there.” In subsequent weeks, the president’s concern deepened. “I stayed awake last night thinking of this thing,” he told Bundy in May. “It looks to me like we’re getting into another Korea. . . . I don’t think we can fight them 10,000 miles away from home. . . . I don’t think it’s worth fighting for. . . . It’s just the biggest damned mess I ever saw.” Although the secretary of defense admitted that he did “not know [what was] going on over there” and the president did not consider Vietnam “worth fighting for,” both behaved as if the future of the republic were at stake, investing hundreds of billions of dollars and the soul of a generation. Between 1964 and 1975, Vietnam consumed the lives of more than 58,000 American soldiers and upwards of three million Vietnamese. Today, in 2006, Vietnam stands as a relic of the Cold War, one of a handful of countries still wedded to Marx, Lenin, and May 1st renditions of the Communist Internationale. If anything, the war made Vietnam more dedicated to Communism, not less.
Forty years after admitting complete ignorance of Vietnam, Robert McNamara released his memoirs, a book “I [had] planned never to write,” he admitted. No wonder. In a warning to future presidents and policymakers, he confessed to monumental arrogance. “We viewed . . . South Vietnam in terms of our own experience,” he wrote. “We saw in them a thirst for—and a determination to fight for freedom and democracy. . . . We totally misjudged the political forces in the country . . . We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people. . . . [We exhibited] a profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of . . . the area . . . We failed to recognize the limits of modern, high-technology military equipment. . . . We [forgot] that U.S. military action—other than direct threats to our own security—should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational force supported fully . . . by the international community. . . . External military force cannot substitute for the political order and stability that must be forged by a people for themselves. . . . The consequences of large-scale military operations . . . are inherently difficult to predict and to control. . . . These are the lessons of Vietnam. Pray God we learn them.”
The one war in three decades in which the United States had probably done far more good than harm turned unpopular simply because it was not easy enough. The Vietnam syndrome had never left and the Iraq War (2003-) seems unlikely to vanquish it.
1
Eternal War: The Vietnamese Heritage
Vietnam is nobody’s dog.
—Nguyen Co Thach, 1978.
He was a wisp of a man, thin and gaunt, frail and seemingly vulnerable, his stringy goatee elongating an already long face. After seventy-six years of world wandering, hiding, and escaping, he was finally declining, wrinkled brown skin now only translucently covering his bones. Over the years his rivals might easily have failed fully to recognize the fire that possessed him. In 1966 Ho Chi Minh was ill, and he calmly waited for eternal rest from a life of boundless striving. It was his peculiar lot that two enemy nations had drawn his very qualified admiration. A lover of much of French culture, he had led Vietnam in a war of national liberation against France, at one point adopting, in a vain hope to get American support, a close version of the American Declaration of Independence. Now that country was his antagonist.
Late in 1966, when the war in Vietnam approached its peak, Ho remarked to Jean Sainteny, an old French diplomat and friend: “The Americans... can wipe out all the principal towns of Tonkin [northern Vietnam].... We expect it, and, besides, we are prepared for it. But that does not weaken our determination to fight to the very end. You know, we’ve already had the experience, and you have seen how that conflict ended.” It was only a matter of time before the Americans went the same way as the Chinese, Japanese, and French. Vietnam was for the Vietnamese, not for anyone else, and that passion had driven Ho Chi Minh throughout his life.
That key to Ho’s passion is the fundamental theme of Vietnamese history. Long ago a Chinese historian remarked, “The people of Vietnam do not like the past.” No wonder. Vietnam developed in the shadow of Chinese imperialism. In 208 B.C. the Han dynasty expanded into southern China and Vietnam, declaring the region a new Chinese province— Giao Chi. Its informal name for the region was Nam Viet, which meant “land of the southern Viets.” Over the centuries the Chinese brought to Vietnam their mandarin administrative system, along with their technology, writing, and Confucian social philosophy. But control did not translate into assimilation. Intensely ethnocentric, the Vietnamese, while welcoming many Chinese institutions, refused to accept a Chinese identity. The historian Frances FitzGerald describes that dilemma in Vietnamese history: “The Vietnamese leaders assumed Chinese political culture while rejecting... Chinese political domination.”
Periodically, the Vietnamese violently resisted, giving Vietnam such national heroes as the Trung sisters, who led an anti-Chinese insurrection in A.D. 40; Trieu Au, the Vietnamese Joan of Arc who led a rebellion in A.D. 248; and Ngo Quyen, the military leader of Vietnam’s successful revolution in 938. An old Vietnamese proverb captures the region’s history: “Vietnam is too close to China, too far from heaven.” Even after they achieved independence in 938, the Vietnamese had to deal periodically with Chinese or Mongol expansionism. Vietnam fought major wars against invaders from the north in 1257, the 1280s, 1406–1428, and 1788. Tran Hung Dao, the great thirteenth-century Vietnamese general, defeated the enemy after having all his soldiers tattoo the inscription “Kill the Mongols” on their right arms. He wrote: “We have seen the enemy’s ambassadors stroll about in our streets with conceit.... They have demanded precious stones and embroidered silks to satisfy their boundless appetite.... They have extracted silver and gold from our limited treasures. It is really not different from bringing meat to feed hungry tigers.”
In the centuries-long struggle against China, Vietnam developed a hero cult that elevated martial qualities as primary virtues. Vietnamese art glorified the sword-wielding, armor-bearing soldiers riding horses or elephants into battle. War, not peace, was woven into the cloth of Vietnamese history. The historian William Turley writes that out of this experience the Vietnamese fashioned a myth of national indomitability.... The Vietnamese forged a strong collective identity... long before the Europeans appeared off their shores.” Vietnam’s enemies learned that lesson the hard way.
But there was also a patience to Vietnamese militarism, an unwillingness to be intimidated, a conviction that a small country could prevail against an empire if it bided its time and waited for its moment. Between 1406 and 1428, led by the great Le Loi, the Vietnamese attacked the Chinese through hit-and-run guerrilla warfare, letting rugged mountains and thick rain forests do much of their work
for them, wearing down the enemy, sapping its spirit, confusing its objectives, finally delivering a death blow, a strategic offensive to drive the Chinese back across the border. That story became legendary in Vietnamese military history.
Anti-Chinese resistance became the cutting edge of Vietnamese identity. A prominent eighteenth-century Chinese emperor lamented the stubbornness of the Vietnamese. They are not, he said, “a reliable people. An occupation does not last very long before they raise their arms against us and expel us from their country.” Suspicion of the Chinese permeated Vietnamese history. In 1945, for example, with the French ready to return to Vietnam and Chinese troops occupying much of northern Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh agreed to cooperate temporarily with France. When some of his colleagues protested, Ho remarked that it “is better to sniff French shit for a while than to eat Chinese shit all our lives.”
For Ho Chi Minh, the “French shit” was still bad enough. France had come to Vietnam in two stages, first in the seventeenth century and again in the nineteenth. Father Alexandre de Rhodes, a French Jesuit, traveled to Hanoi in 1627, converted thousands of Vietnamese to Roman Catholicism, and created a Latin alphabet for the Vietnamese language. Although suspicious Vietnamese leaders expelled de Rhodes in 1630 and again in 1645, he planted the seeds of the French empire. The French returned in force to Vietnam in 1847 when a naval expedition arrived at Tourane (later called Danang) and, within a few weeks, fought a pitched battle with local Vietnamese. Two more French warships fought another battle at Tourane in 1856. A French fleet captured Tourane in 1858 and conquered Saigon in 1859. Vietnamese resistance drove the French out, but in 1861 they returned to Saigon to stay. After signing a treaty with Siam (now Thailand) in 1863, France established a protectorate over Cambodia. France extended its control over southern Vietnam, or Cochin China, during the rest of the decade. France then turned north, and in 1883 a naval expedition reached the mouth of the Perfume River, just outside Hue. When the French fleet shelled the city, a Vietnamese leader gave France a protectorate over Annam (central Vietnam) and Tonkin (northern Vietnam), although it took France years to assert its control in those regions. To provide uniform government over the colonies, France established the French Union in 1887. After securing a protectorate over Laos by signing another treaty with Siam in 1893, France had five regions in the Union: Cochin China, Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia, and Laos.