Vietnam: The Loss Of A Lost War

A fiery explosion following a U.S. napalm strike during the Vietnam War (1966).

A report reaches the Oval Office in 1964, where president Lyndon B. Johnson awaits. It reads, “The USS Maddox has been struck in international waters by the North Vietnamese.” The time has come to go to war. To the average person, this incident, known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, defines the start of the Vietnam War. President Johnson gave the order, and the United States was now sending troops to Vietnam. Is that really the start though?

Context

The 1960s define the era of decolonization, where public outcry and weakening empires led to the creation of many new independent nations. These nations unfortunately chose a difficult time to become independent. The Cold War between the democratic United States and the communist Soviet Union was in full swing, and these “third-world” nations were the perfect battlefield to conduct it. Vietnam, which was originally a French colony in the region of French-Indochina, quickly gained its independence from France after World War II. However, after gaining independence, Vietnam itself was already divided over the ideologies of communism in the North and democracy in the South. To the United States and the Soviet Union, Vietnam came to the forefront of their attention as a battle between the two world powers.

Prior to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, the United States and the Soviet Union had both been sending light aid to their respective ideologist sides. The North was smoothly run by the communist leader Ho Chi Minh, who commanded the armies of the Viet Cong and Viet Minh. The democratic South had a bit more of a rough leadership, with the original leader, Ngo Dinh Diem losing support from the United States and being indirectly assassinated by the CIA in 1963 after it was revealed that he persecuted Buddhists. Afterwards, the South was led by dictators until the end of the war.

Things escalated with the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Following American public outrage against Vietnam, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, one of the most controversial laws passed to this day. The Resolution gave president Johnson unrestricted power to conduct war in Vietnam in order to maximize efficiency of the fighting. At the time, the thinking was that the United States would quickly win the war, so it made sense to have one person running the whole operation to prevent hold ups and hesitancy. However, this all rode on public support, which would soon deteriorate quickly.

America Starts to Lose Trust

Members of the Viet Cong in combat.

A couple of reasons caused the American people to lose interest in the war. Firstly, the war itself. The United States Army was not doing as great as expected, and the guerilla tactics of the Viet Cong were proving to be very effective. After all, the revolutionary fighters in the 1770s also defeated the “unbeatable” British with guerilla tactics. Then, in 1968, word of the Tet Offensive came out. The Viet Cong had launched big attack on the United States, causing a massive loss of life. The reason this was so significant was that the people had thought America was winning, and that the war would soon be over. After all, if the government and media say so, then it has to be true. It turns out that the government and media had both been lying about the state of the war, and when people found out, there was an instant loss of trust in the government, known as a credibility gap. Then, people soon came to know about the My Lai Massacre, a horrendous war crime committed by American troops. They had attacked a Vietnamese village and committed heinous war crimes against its inhabitants. Even worse, only one man from the squadron that had orchestrated the attack was found guilty. The American people quickly figured out that they were not the good guys in this battle, and from there things spiraled.

With growing unrest against the war, presidential candidate Richard Nixon used the promise of ending the war to dominate the 1968 election, which is why it was a surprise to the American people that for five years after Nixon’s election, the war continued. Nixon did end up decreasing United States involvement in the war through a process called Vietnamization, where the South Vietnamese were trained to take over roles from the American Army. Things seemed to slowly, but surely, be getting better for the United States. That was until the Pentagon Papers were released.

In 1971, the New York Times got hold of some covered up government documents about United States involvement in Vietnam. They revealed that the U.S was actually secretly involved in Vietnam starting from Truman’s presidency, and that the war was prolonged not because it was considered winnable, but because America was trying to prevent international embarrassment. This was unacceptable for the American people. People’s children and best friends had been drafted and killed in a war that the government had already given up on. In other words, they lost their lives for nothing. The outrage sparked by the Pentagon Papers and fueled by the Watergate Scandal led to the rapid resignation of President Nixon, and the start of massive debates about what government powers. For one, the people were uncertain about how much power a president should have during a crisis. For many, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was too far, and Congress soon repealed it with the War Powers Act of 1973.

In Vietnam, things weren’t going so well either. After the United States pulled out completely in 1973 under the Paris Peace Accords, it wasn’t long before the vulnerable south fell to the north after the Viet Cong captured the Southern capital, Saigon, in 1975, unifying Vietnam under communist rule. As an effect, many fled their homes and immigrated to the United States.

In the end, the Vietnam War was not just a conflict overseas, but a turning point that reshaped both Vietnam and the United States. It exposed the limits of American military power, deepened distrust in the government, and sparked major political and social debate. Even after Vietnam was unified under communist rule in 1975, the effects of the war continued to influence U.S. politics, foreign policy, and public opinion. The war ultimately showed that its impact extended far beyond the battlefield.