What johnpost said, the whole monolithic Communism thing.
Also, out involvement was incremental, starting with advisors to the South Vietnamese Army, followed by air support, followed by inserting a Marine expeditionary force followed by commitment of elements of two Army divisions, followed by more Air force and More Marines and more Army until we were in so deep we could not get out without a significant loss of face. Each little step made it harder not to take the next little step and each little step, by itself was arguably reasonable. It took ten years before we were in whole-hog.
This from a guy who sat in the shade of a truck at Ft. Riley, Kansas, in the summer of 1965 and listened to Lyndon Johnson talk about the next little step that would involve sending in first a brigade of the First Infantry Division and the whole outfit not much latter.
Difficult today to understand the news delivery and person to person connectivity was much different in those days.
TV news was only CBS, NBC, ABC and they were basically in tune with the government until 67 or 68. The nightly news was only a 15 minute show up to 1963 when it went up to 30 minutes.
Newspapers were much thicker and contained the in depth news, but you had to read through them to get.
Phones were the old rotary dial models and long distance was very expensive.
Hand written letters in the snail mail was the way families communicated to each other.
No Internet.
The means and methods for many to interconnect were exceptionally limited in those days.
I remember constantly hearing of the domino theory while in grade school.
Nightly news always claimed low losses for us, big losses for them. War would be short. I think I read years later that those numbers were just pulled out of someone’s ass.
Those were the two things I remembered growing up. And of course, it just went on and on and on.
Korea seemed to prove that all the locals needed was a bit of help, and after some early difficulties they would turn into a modern, industrialised, first world nation which would be a staunch anti-communist ally.
I always thought of Vietnam as a tarbaby. And I didn’t think the NVs were communists as much as they just wanted a unified country without any French or US. But in exchange for Soviet arms, equipment, etc, they mouthed the pro-commie words.
Except in the 60s South Korea was not a modern industrialized first world nation. They were a poor backwards semi-colony with authoritarian rule. It wasn’t until the 1980s, long after the Vietnam war was over that South Korea started to transform into a modern country.
Johnson and his SOD (McNamara) dreamed up the statistic known as the “body count”. Each week, the media would report on how many Viet Cong we offed (as well as US troop deaths). MacNamara was convinced that we could win by killing more of them than they could of us. Some magazine (Natoinal Lampoon?) added up these numbers, and determined that by 1969, the war had ended (we had killed the entire population of North Vietnam). The public got cynical after a while.
This illusion went all the way up to the top. Nixon and Kissinger kept trying to make deals with the Soviets and the Chinese to end the Vietnamese War. We would offer Moscow or Beijing something they wanted and in exchange they were supposed to tell Hanoi to dial back the attacks.
The problem with this deal making is that Moscow and Beijing had relatively minimal control over Hanoi. They could at best influence the North Vietnamese government, not give orders. But the Soviets and the Chinese didn’t want to admit how little power they actually had over the Vietnamese so they would claim they could tell the North Vietnamese what to do.
Not really. The Geneva Accord did not divide Vietnam into two countries. Vietnam was still officially a single country but it was administered by two different governments - the government in Saigon and the government in Hanoi each ran the part of Vietnam where they were in control at the time the Accord was signed in 1954. But this was supposed to be just a temporary arrangement. A general election was scheduled for 1956 which was supposed to chose a single government that would control the entire country.
The Saigon government then repudiated this agreement when it declared its territory to be a separate and independent country, the Republic of Vietnam, in 1955.
You’re right that the August 2 attack happened. The issue under debate for that attack was whether the American forces were in international waters or in North Vietnamese territorial waters. The questions are where exactly the attacks occurred, whose definition of territorial waters you accepted, and whether or not an island belonged to North Vietnam.
God, does this bring back memories. PastTense, Little Nemo, Lord Feldon, Alessan, panache45, pkbites, ralph124c, TriPolar, Hari Seldon, cjepson, johnpost, davida03801, I. Dunno, et al are right on. And the Domino Theory and the body count were in the news ALL THE TIME. It was a sick, sick time.
Unfortunately the powers-that-be learned how to further castrate the news media with this “embedded” thing.
Whatever else they may have told you, they were not wrong about this. The numbers the news broadcasts stated may not have been strictly correct, but we lost around 58,000 men compared to 2-3 million Vietnamese. Our losses, given the nature and intensity of the fighting, were not high.
The advancement of technology has reduced our losses to the point where we are outraged over losing 5,000 men in a decade while completely defeating and occupying two countries and fighting insurgencies in both, but in that era 50,000 men over more than a decade of high-intensity fighting wasn’t bad. The problem, then as now, isn’t that they died but that they were wasted for a stupid reason. Hindsight allows us to look back at Vietnam and say that it was a pointless exercise.
Strictly speaking, this is absolutely true. That doesn’t change the fact that the numbers that were given out were lies, day after day after day. That revelation was one of the things that soured so many former supporters of the war, and led to the general collapse of support for government that persists to this day. Both the Johnson and Nixon administrations were guilty of lying about the war; by the time of Nixon, however, the split in the culture was so huge that support for Nixon began to be equated with support for America. For a majority (the badly-misnamed Silent Majority) the lies Nixon told didn’t matter as much as the hatred for those calling him a liar.
That marked the beginning of the two cultures creating separate factual realities that we see in hypertrophied fashion today.
All of that remained true up through about 1993-1994, as a matter of fact. Unless you’re under about 25, you probably remember some degree of that. I think long distance phone calls might have been a tad cheaper by then, but I still remember it being a BIG DEAL to talk long distance with my aunt and uncle in Kansas.
Like the whole concept of “POW/MIAs.” Nixon had the MIAs (who had died and whose bodies were not found) lumped in with the POWs to triple the number of prisoners who needed to be fought for.
Same goes for the VietCong which united bona fide communist sympathizers, Buddhist people who really wanted Diem’s oppressive ass to go away, poor farmers who really wanted Diem’s agrarian reforms to go away, former Viet Minh people who’d already fought *once *to get bloody foreigners out of Vietnam, people who simply wanted to have them national elections wot had been talked about in 1954 but seemed to have been forgotten since…
According to some accounts, many of the southern insurgency groups weren’t even all that cosy with the NV government and army. In these cases, the situation was more “the enemy of my enemy is… kind of shitty if I’m being honest, but first things first”.
“Pretty soon” being around the mid 70s. So “pretty gorram late”, in the context of the Vietnam war :). Fact is, trying to get close to China was (in part, one of) Nixon’s strategy to try and get out of the whole mess without it looking like a defeat.
Basically around that time (70s) US foreign policy stopped considering The Reds as one monolithic entity that should not and would not be dealt with ever because they were Always Chaotic Evil, and started making overtures towards this or that individual communist country. Basically because the other way a) didn’t work b) couldn’t work c) led to nuclear warfare threats and d) actually rallied the communist countries together.
However between Mao’s virulent disagreements with Khrouchtchev over the latter’s policy of détente, Mao’s prospective heirs virulent disagreements with Brezhnev over the latter’s policy of FUCK DETENTE, and of course the whole Prague Spring episode ; the US (or more precisely Kissinger) realized that iron-cast purely ideological dick-waving contests are fine and all, but maybe dealing in actual reality-based facts instead could possibly lead to something. Hence Nixon in China ; trade agreements ; cue cheap lead-painted toys, iPhones and so forth.
Didn’t mean to leave the impression that the Geneva Accord had divided the State of Vietnam into two separate countries. The State of Vietnam (1949-1955) was divided along the 17th parallel by the brain trust of the Geneva Conference of 1954. There would be a northern State of Vietnam, and a southern State of Vietnam. Same country, different zones.
*The Geneva Accords, which were issued on July 21, 1954, set out the following terms in relation to Vietnam:
a “provisional military demarcation line” running approximately along the 17th Parallel “on either side of which the forces of the two parties shall be regrouped after their withdrawal”.
a 3 miles (4.8 km) wide demilitarized zone on each side of the demarcation line
French Union forces to regroup to the south of the line and Viet Minh to the north
free movement of the population between the zone for three hundred days
neither zone to join any military alliance or seek military reinforcement
establishment of the International Control Commission, comprising Canada, Poland and India as chair, to monitor the ceasefire
The agreement was signed by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, France, the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. The State of Vietnam rejected the agreement*