'I need to know everything about the Vietnam War by Thursday!' (continued)
Who were we fighting, exactly?
Here is where your teacher and I are most likely to disagree. The popular view of the Vietnam War is that the Americans were meddling in a civil war between the South Vietnamese government and the National Liberation Front. Heck, you can read entire history books in which "the Front" is the only enemy mentioned, at least until sympathetic North Vietnamese traveled down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to give the "people's forces" a helping hand. But this isn't the way the war developed at all.
When the country was divided in 1955, about 100,000 Viet Minh
guerrillas who had been fighting in the south were repatriated to
the north. Others greased and buried their weapons and returned
to civilian life. Very early, however, they began to operate
against the South Vietnamese government much as they had
previously operated against the French, murdering landlords and
village officials, levying taxes on the peasants, and recruiting
new soldiers. They were aided by the former southern guerrillas
who had gone north, been rested and retrained, and then sent down
the jungle route that would become famous as the Ho Chi Minh
Trail. (Basically, the route began in North Vietnam, moved west
into Laos and south through Laos and Cambodia, before moving east
again into South Vietnam, neatly bypassing the ARVN divisions
stationed at the 17th Parallel to deter the expected invasion.)
The rebellion became official in October 1957, when the communists in the south--in obedience to instructions from North Vietnam--organized themselves into 37 armed companies. The South Vietnamese government looked upon them as bandits, and regarded their suppression as a job for the police.
Obviously the new force couldn't be called Viet Minh, because the vast majority of Vietnamese regarded the Viet Minh as the army that had liberated their country from the French (and Ho Chi Minh as the George Washington figure of the Vietnamese revolution). So a new name was coined: Viet Cong, meaning Vietnamese communist. By whatever name, the military force was well established by the time the National Liberation Front was formed in December 1960. And the NLF was never more than that--a front for the actual managers of the insurrection, who were Ho Chi Minh and his chief of staff, General Vo Nguyen Giap. Make no mistake: the rebellion in the south was conceived, supported, and directed from North Vietnam. The southerners and the northerners didn't always agree on tactics, but they had the same aim: to overthrow the Saigon government and unite the northern and southern halves of the country.
At first, the assistance consisted of former Viet Minh
guerrillas, returning to the south, along with Chinese copies of
the Russian AK-47 assault rifle. (It was still true, however,
that most Viet Cong weapons were captured from the government forces,
especially heavy weapons such as machine guns and mortars.)
In 1964, the first North Vietnamese regulars came down
the Ho Chi Minh Trail--about 10,000 troops that year. Meanwhile,
the "trail" was upgraded to a modern supply line with hardened
roads and bridges that could handle heavy trucks. The trail was
protected by anti-aircraft guns, and underground workshops, barracks,
hospitals, and gasoline depots were built at regular intervals.
These not only supported the convoys coming down the trail, but
also provided a safe fall-back for the troops operating in South
Vietnam.
That summer, South Vietnamese commandos in fast gunboats
raided the northern coast under the protection of U.S. warships
stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin. They included the destroyers
Maddox and Turner Joy, which on August 3 baited the
North Vietnamese by making runs toward the shore. That night the
two destroyers may or may not have been attacked by North
Vietnamese patrol boats, which in any event inflicted no damage.
The American response had already been scripted: U.S. Navy jets
rose from the carriers Ticonderoga and
Constellation and bombed the North Vietnamese patrol-boat
bases.
The war-powers resolution was immediately presented to the
U.S. Senate, which passed it with only two dissenting votes.
Pausing only to win a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in
November (the landslide was in part attributable to fears that
Goldwater would get us into war!), President Johnson continued to
follow the script that was on his desk. He authorized routine
bombing of North Vietnam, sent U.S. Marines to guard an airfield
at Danang, and--the fatal step--committed the U.S. Army to fight
the Viet Cong on the ground. For their part, North Vietnamese
troops entered combat alongside the Viet Cong. One year after I
left Saigon, the "airmobile" U.S. 1st Cavalry Division was
battling three North Vietnamese divisions in the Ia Drang Valley,
and what I had known as a counter-insurgency had become something
very like a conventional war, though one without a front or "main
line of resistance."
Historians are still debating whether the attack on the U.S.
destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin was real, imagined, or
invented after the fact. Most likely it was a combination of the
first two, but it scarcely matters. In the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution in August, President Johnson had succeeded in tricking
the Congress into giving him a blank check to prosecute the war
as he saw fit. And with his electoral landslide in November, he
could claim another blank check, this one from the American
people who had given him a landslide victory.
If the U.S. had been content to
continue its advisory role, the South Vietnamese government would
probably have collapsed within a year or two. (Though this wasn't
obvious to those of us who were in Vietnam at the time.) But that
collapse would have been a defeat only for the South Vietnamese
army and government. Once American combat units were deployed,
that was no longer true. With the events of 1964, the United
States had committed itself to fight the longest war war in its
history, and the third most deadly, with the toll of American war
dead exceeded only by the Civil War and World War II.
Note that the overwhelming majority of Americans who served in
Vietnam were not combat soldiers. (The "tooth to tail" or "ass to
grass" ratio is often estimated as 1 to 10.) The only sound measurement
of who was in harm's way is to take the deaths--and even here the
measurement isn't exact, since young, black, and working-class
soldiers are probably more likely to die in non-combat accidents
than those who are older, white, and from middle-class backgrounds.
With those caveats, here are the figures:
In short, the typical American combat soldier in the Vietnam War was a
white high-school graduate in his early twenties.
"For those who have never been in a tropical jungle they look
impenetrable from the outside. Jungle is nothing
more than forest. I
live in Florida and we call small and large forests, hammocks or
bayheads. A cypress bayhead looks impenetrable from the outside and
in a way that's true. They are very difficult to get inside because
they are surrounded by brush and small trees and vines,
but once inside it is relatively easy to walk around. The same is
true with mangroves. I've read in books where mangrove forests are
impenetrable, yet I have walked through untold miles of mangrove
forests.
In Vietnam there were many types of forests. The ones called triple
canopy were the best to walk through. I loved walking through triple
canopy forests because the lack of sunlight prevented undergrowth to a
large extent. Some types of vegetation such as ferns like to grow
without direct sunlight but normally the triple canopy forest was a
pleasure to walk through and relatively free of brush. It was also
cooler there.
Even some Vietnam vets have the mistaken belief that one had to hack
their way though a triple canopy jungle with machetes. This simply is
not true. There were areas where vines and other vegetation were too
thick to walk through but these were areas void of the large trees
which blocked sunlight.
The term "triple canopy" is overused. Much of the forests in Vietnam
were not triple canopy; they were forests with trees of relatively
the same height with small and large open areas. This type of varied
forest was difficult to walk through. Mostly we walked on the trails
made by the VC and NVA. This was dangerous but often those trails led
us to hidden sites."
Of that number, 687 were released at one time or another, most of
them in Operation Homecoming in the spring of 1973. Another 36 escaped,
and 71 died in captivity, However, many thousands of Americans are listed as "missing in action"
in Vietnam (the same is true of earlier conflicts). Most were killed under
circumstances that made it impossible to recover their bodies or otherwise
confirm their identity. Probably some were prisoners who died in
captivity. Perhaps a few were held against their will
after Operation Homecoming and the 1975 fall of the South Vietnamese
government. It is also possible, though in my judgment extremely unlikely,
that a few American servicemen are still alive in Southeast Asia or even
in the former Soviet Union.
What was the Gulf of Tokin Incident?
1964 was the year when everything changed in South Vietnam. Even
as North Vietnam began to send its army south, President Johnson
began to "Americanize" the war. He appointed his highest military
official, General Maxwell Taylor, as U.S. ambassador to South
Vietnam. The actual dispatch of American ground troops would have
to wait until after the November elections, which Johnson hoped
to win by a huge margin in order to legitimize his presidency,
which up to now had operated in the shadow of the martyred
Kennedy. Meanwhile, the administration drew up a list of targets
in North Vietnam that would be bombed unless Ho Chi Minh removed
his forces from the south. (The North Vietnamese knew this, since
they were warned; the American people did not.) However, Johnson
didn't want to send warplanes over North Vietnam without
Congressional approval, so he also drew up a resolution for
Congress to pass. All that was lacking was an excuse to present
that resolution to Congress.
Who were the American soldiers in Vietnam?
The popular image of Vietnam is that the war was fought by poor
black teenagers. In fact, the demographic profile of the American
fighting man in Vietnam was not much different from his brothers-in-arms
in other wars, with due allowance for the changing times.
What kind of training did American soldiers have?
One of my correspondents asked this question, and she proved quite
unable to understand my answers. I realized that young people who have
never been in the military don't have any conception of how it works,
so I wrote her a long letter explaining my own basic training at
Fort Dix in 1956. This was ten years before Vietnam hotted up, but
I don't think that things had changed much, with the exception of
the rifle and rifle grenade that I used. See it at
basic training.
Wasn't it tough, fighting in the jungle?
On a moderated Vietnam newsgroup, a veteran who signed himself Dino
posted this view of wilderness combat in South Vietnam:
How many Americans were POWs?
794 Americans are known to have been prisoners of the Viet Cong, the
North Vietnamese, or their allied forces in Southeast Asia.
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