According to Wikipedia, around 280K US soldiers, ~500K Vietnamese soldiers, and ~500K Vietnamese civilians died in the war.
In retrospect, was it a strategic blunder to get the US involved in the war? Or was getting into the war justified, but it was executed poorly?
In my mind the 280K US soldiers all died needlessly, for a war in a land far far away, with not much strategic meaning for the security of the homeland.
Are there people today who believe the US involvement in the war was justified and therefore the deaths were unfortunate but necessary for US security?
I think we were stupid to get involve but all you have to do is look up the Domino Theory for those who believe it was the right thing to do and we just did a terrible job in Vietnam.
The Vietnamese accept that it had strategic value for the security of their homeland. They ended up having to fight the Khmer Rouge and the Chinese, too.
It’s the ‘and Allies’ in the “US and allied military deaths” that’s confusing you. The overwhelming majority of both the total figure and of the ‘and Allies’ are ARVN deaths. A small part of the figure is also Free World Allies: South Korea, Australia, Philippines, New Zealand and Thailand, all of whom participated in the war.
As to the question posed by the OP, currently accepted by who? And what qualifies as ‘in vain’? There’s no consensus on either of those. I think that the war was a mistake, but I certainly wouldn’t tell veterans of the war that I’ve known that their friends who died in vain. If you’re looking for a war with clear cut black and white answers to questions like that and clear ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys,’ Vietnam is definitely not the war to look at.
I don’t think there’s a single major strategic goal that we tried to accomplish in Vietnam that we succeeded in meeting, unless you count things related to the evacuation, so I don’t see how anyone would think that they weren’t in vain. It would have been better to not get involved, or not as deeply, knowing now how it would turnout. That doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision; it’s just what the facts are now.
Are there people who still believe in the validity of the domino theory? In retrospect, it seems to have been pretty thoroughly debunked by subsequent events.
I believe that @Siam_Sam posted that in Thailand, there is a significant belief that the US involvement in Vietnam prevented Thailand from going Communist?
But I could be misremembering, so I’ll just ping Siam_Sam and see what he says.
In war, soldiers are often fighting to defend others in their squad. If you read the stories of U.S. Medal of Honor winners, you’ll see some who saved multiple fellow Americans from death while sacrificing themselves.
The same must be true of many deaths among ARVN troops, and our other allies, and among our adversaries.
At a geostrategic level, North Vietnam and the U.S. were and are natural allies, so the war was a horrible mistake.
The war started back in 1955. After the French pulled out in 1954, plans were made for a countrywide election in 1955. Surveys showed that Ho Chi Minh was the certain winner. The Americans stopped the election. The country split and the civil war started. One side was communist and therefore could not be allowed to win under any circumstances.
This is not historic revisionism. Any questioning adult should have known it by the time the war was deepest. I learned it in a college course in the late 60s, backed by the books that already detailed the history of the conflict, just as accessible as books about the Trump administration.
After Robert McNamera admitted it on camera for a documentary, the fact that the government knew that the war was unwinnable yet continued to shovel in hundreds of thousands of draftees has to be factored in to every examination of justification for the war.
Everything about the war proved to be wrong, including the multiple, horrific, years-long atrocities committed by the troops in the country. (I can only hope I wouldn’t have done the same if I had been there.) Nobody on any side came out of the war looking good, and the atrocities go all the way up. Johnson and Nixon are forever tarred by them.
Does that mean all the deaths were in vain? That’s an unanswerable philosophic question. In one sense all deaths in all wars are in vain. Wars should never start. Yet, pacifism is not reasonable in a world in which others start wars. Fighting an unwinnable war by deceiving the people you are sending in to die is a particularly indefensible act. But in a larger picture, Vietnam was a tiny blip in the 40-year-long Cold War, which was not started by America, although we enthusiastically contributed to making the conflict gigantic and all-consuming.
I could yet and but for a long time, but the bottom line is that Vietnam was a mistake from start to nonfinish. If that makes the deaths in vain, so be it.
The study came up with a most likely Vietnamese death toll of 882,000, which included 655,000 adult males (above 15 years of age), 143,000 adult females, and 84,000 children. Those totals include only Vietnamese deaths, and do not include American and other allied military deaths which amounted to about 64,000.
Bolding mine
Because of the butterfly effect, I think there’s no reason to believe that the deaths were not in vain. But, if history had played out much like it did except for the absence of the war, specifically, that Vietnam would still align itself with the Communists rather than be neutral, and that Vietnam would still support the Khmer Rouge, and that the Khmer Rouge would still take over Cambodia and institute the Cambodian Genocide, then the war had the positive effect of training the North Vietnamese army which allowed them to swiftly overthrow the Khmer Rouge. As it happens, the Cambodian Genocide claimed around as many lives as the Vietnam War did, and who knows how many would have continued to die had they not been overthrown, so it very well could have saved a substantial number of Cambodian lives.
However, since everything is intertwined, there is no reason to believe that all of that would have happened had the war not taken place. Other, even more speculative things, may have taken place in their stead.
The United States didn’t really have much interest in southeast Asia. But after WWII, France wanted to re-establish its colonial empire. America wanted French support in Europe and France’s price was that we supported France in SE Asia (but not with American troops). You can argue that in a realpolitik world, screwing SE Asia was an acceptable price for gaining France.
The problem was the way we sold this. The American people were generally opposed to European colonialism. So the Truman and Eisenhower administrations chose to say that we were supporting opposition to communism rather than rebuilding French colonialism. There was enough overlap between the two in that region that we could get away with this as long as the stakes remained low.
The problem came in 1954 when France decided it had had enough and withdrew from Vietnam. That meant we no longer had a real reason to be there and we should have withdrawn as well.
But having sold this conflict to the American people as an anti-communist crusade the government didn’t want to admit we had really been fighting for colonialism. The result was that even though colonialism was no longer a factor, we felt like we had to keep fighting against communism. So we were stuck fighting a war even though our reason for fighting that war was gone. We had to pretend our fake reason was real.
We can see the alternative. The United Kingdom had also been supporting France in its conflict in SE Asia. But not having to worry about domestic anti-colonialism, they could be open about the reason they were doing this. So when France withdrew in 1954, the UK withdrew with them. America would have been better off if we had followed their example.
