From 1964 through 1972 the following military forces served in Vietnam:
Australia…37,000 (470 KIA)
Korea…340,000 (4,400 KIA)
Thailand…38,000 (350 KIA)
New Zealand…2,500 (60 KIA)
Philippiness…6,100 (?)
And don’t forget that while the US suffered about 58,000 killed (about 46,000 KIA and 12,000 other) the South Vietnamese suffered about 210,000 killed in action.
http://users.mildura.net.au/users/marshall/ has good amount of info on Australian involment in Vietnam.
See, like fragging, this is one those generation gaps. To someone my age, the Domino Effect is that if your pizza isn’t delivered in 30 minutes it’s free.
Seriously, though, I don’t quite understand why the government was stupid enough to kick all the experts on Asia out in the 50s and then not listen to anyone who might have known what they were talking about in the 60s.
About the domino theory –
The domino theory comes from a 1954 press conference given by President Eisenhower. It was not originally meant to refer to the whole world, just to Southeast Asia.
Now some argue that the domino theory was ridiculous because Indochina fell and the others didn’t. But the fact is that there were serious communist insurgencies in all of the countries mentioned by Eisenhower. Here’s what Guenter Lewy says in his book “America in Vietnam” about the domino theory:
Are/were any of the communist governments in recent history really communist? i.e., how closely did they generally resemble Marxism as it was originally conceived? It seemed to me when I was growing up (in the 80’s) that all the communist governments were basically group-dictatorships, with a ruthless ruling class living off the backs of the poor and suppressing all free speech, free press, etc. so their situation wouldn’t change. Was I wrong?
Another possible factor is that the young people who protested against the war were the first generation to grow up with the fear of nuclear war. “Duck and cover” drills in school, bomb shelters in the back yard. Sputnik, which shocked the west and made people realize just how vulnerable America now was to nuclear attack. A succession of crisis- Berlin, Cuba- and the fear that someday one would escalate to a global nuclear war. In short, you had an entire generation of young people who had wondered if they were going to grow up, and who were outraged at what they perceived as the older (WWII) generation’s insane hawkism.
The lottery system was an improvement, IMO. The decline in the draft numbers themselves however are pretty stunning and may have been more important to a decline in protests:
1969 283,586
1970 162,746
1971 94,092
1972 49,514
1973 646
1970 was the first year the lottery method was used.
Everyone’s saying that Red China backed North Vietnam. The way I learned it, it wasn’t China behind them, it was the Soviet Union. There was no love lost between China and Vietnam.
There was a long-forgotten Communist insurgency in the jungles of Southeast Asia in the late 1940s and early 1950s: the “Malayan Emergency.” It was fomented by ethnic Chinese in Malaysia (before it was called Malaysia, it was just Peninsular Malaya), still a British colony at the time. Who here has even heard of this at all? Raise your hands. … Didn’t think so. (You can stop waving your hand around, Tamerlane, I know you knew all about it. 
)
The Malayan Emergency was successfully, conclusively put down by the British early in the 1950s and never more troubled that steamy little land. The British general who accomplished this, Templer, was approached by the Pentagon as an expert consultant on Southeast Asian jungle counter-insurgency, as they were starting to get involved in Viet-Nam (it was called Viet-Nam in those days). Templer told them flat out that there was no resemblance between the situation in Malaya and that in Viet-Nam, that what they were planning would never work. They quit listening to him and shut him off, because he only told them the plain facts, he didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear. So they pushed on waist deep into the Big Muddy.
Templer was the one strategist who really understood what was going on there. As far as America was concerned, he was never heard from again.
Two points I would add that often get lost when the Vietnam conflict is painted in broad strokes:
North Vietnam was not a client of China. While there may have been some sales of weapons from China to Vietnam during the period, North Vietnam was a client of the Soviet Union. Vietnam and China are traditional enemies (and they have fought several skirmishes since the U.S. pulled out of the South, leaving Chna with the impression that Vietnam was too big for its britches).
The original opposition to the war had nothing to do with the draft.
Even before Kennedy’s assassination, while U.S. involvement was limited to a fairly small number of advisors–who generally advised rather than participating, there was a growing sense in the U.S. that we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The impetus for this belief was the continued reports of authoritarian brutality and corruption in the Diem regime, punctuated by protests among the South Vietnamese people against that administration, and brought to horrifying awareness among the American public by the successive suicides of several Buddhist monks who soaked themselves in gasoline and lit themselves in front of the TV cameras.
While the majority of people in the U.S. remained committed to the fight against “communism” for several more years, the seeds of protest were sown at that time, when people began to ask “Why are we propping up a regime that is hated by its own people?”
The earliest war protests were simply protests against either war, in general, or against the U.S. support for an imposed government. (Diem was not simply a citizen who ran for office, but an exile who was brought back to the country by the U.S.) The protest against the draft was a later development.
The Vietnamese have a long history of kicking occupiers out of their country. They kicked out the French before the U.S. got deeply involved, and in the past had also kicked out the Chinese and others. Getting rid of foreign occupiers is a part of Vietnamese culture.
The U.S. got involved in Vietnam for ideological reasons. At the time, the U.S. and Soviet Union put pressures on all third world countries to take sides in the rivalry between capitalism and communism. This doesn’t mean, though, that main motive of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese was to advance communism. Any minor power that sided against the U.S. pretty much had to side with the Soviet Union (or China, an alliance which was pretty much impossible in this case). The North Vietnamese had to adopt a Soviet socialist line if they wanted help from the Soviet Union.
I believe the main reason the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam is that the Vietnamese were willing to take any amount of punishment to achieve their goal of expelling the U.S. We killed huge numbers of people in that country, and yet they didn’t give up. Their resolve was just too strong.
So the USSR is long gone, and the North Vietnamese wouldn’t have gone Red if they hadn’t needed the assistance from the Soviets. What are they still doing Communist? Inertia?
That’s not too far from the truth. Historian Barbara Tuchman says in her book The March of Folly that if the US had courted the anti-French forces in Indochina after WWII that “the worst they would have ended up with was a southeast-asian Yugoslavia”. And today the People’s Republic is trying to attract outside investment and trade- nowhere near as bad as North Korea.
gjorp’s initial question, as I understand it, was not about the merits of the American policy in Vietnam, but about why there was such strenuous and widespread protest over it in the U.S.
Part of the reason has to do with the times generally. The Vietnam War coincided with the rise of the civil rights and the women’s liberation movements. It was a time when a good many people were in the mood to question conventional wisdom, and to assert their personal freedom.
A good deal of it had to do with the draft. Mike Royko wrote a memorable column after the U.S. stopped sending draftees to fight asking just where all the protesters had gone. People were still opposed to the war, and people were still holding public protests, yet, as Royko observed, once young men were no longer actively afraid of being drafted and sent to fight, the student rallies were by and large fewer, less well-attended, and far more civil. No doubt many people protested the war out of deeply-held moral conviction. At the same time, there really was some truth to the contemporary joke that the peace symbol was “the footprint of the American chicken”.
As noted by a previous poster, the draft was seen as unfair and even kind of crooked. Enrollment in colleges rose as a good many young men chose to go to and stay in college as a means of obtaining a deferment. It was, obviously, the wealthy and middle class who were best able to do this. Movie actor Geroge Hamilton–for a time romantically linked to one of President Johnson’s daughters–got a deferment because he was the sole support of his mother, an extremely wealthy woman with whom he did not live. Sylvester Stallone, who was already playing tough guys in movies before U.S. participation in the war ended,
was ruled to be 4-F on the basis of a letter from his family doctor.
Members of politically influential families such as George W. Bush and Dan Quayle got choice slots in the National Guard and Reserves.
This sort of thing was hardly limited to the rich and celebrities. My brother-in-law, an engineer at the time for Monsanto, got a deferment after his supervisor attested to the “fact” that his work was essential to the war effort. The products he worked on were wholly unrelated to the war effort, as he was the first to admit.
The peace movement was unfairly maligned by reactionary elements in society (some of them enjoying deferments), and ended up alienating a good many people who might otherwise have continued to support the effort.
There were, predictably, people (including members of Congress) who fatuously suggested that critics of American involvement in Vietnam were supporting Communism. Probably the best-remembered incident arising from a war protest in St. Louis came when a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War was attacked and beaten by a gang of war supporters merely for peacefully picketing. A fair number of people started out defending the rights of protesters to hold and express their opinions, and found themselves gradually adopting those opinions themselves.
A great many Americans were willing to go to war to uphold Democracy and human rights, but didn’t see much evidence that supporting South Vietnam involved that. As noted above, South Vietnam, with American support, reneged on its pledge to hold a reunification vote. Later, the CIA had Prime Minister Diem assassinated. Later still, the U.S. helped finance and stage a sham election, funding a South Vietnamese general as a candidate and managing his campaign.
Many people, including Americans who served in Vietnam, saw the government we were supporting as being composed largely of corrupt sons of bitches.
Those Buddhist monks who were shown on TV burning themselves to death didn’t set themselves on fire to protest the war; they were protesting the corruption and prejudice rampant in the Christian-dominated South Vietnamese government.
(Incidentally, the power to rationalize must be one of the most amazing abilities we possess as humans. I recall being assured by war supporters at the time that burning to death in this fashion “didn’t hurt” because the gasoline formed “a protective layer” which kept the flame from a person’s skin. Imagine that: a protective layer that shielded someone from pain even as the marrow in his bones blackened into charcoal and exploded.)
While it was coverage of the Vietnam War which gave rise to the cliche of a liberal-dominated media, many Americans became gradually aware that the mass media was, by and large, selling them a bill of goods about Vietnam for a long time.
After founder Henry Luce died, Time Magazine admitted that it had knowingly lied about how many Americans and Vietnames were being killed at the besest of the U.S. government. After Ky assumed the office of prime minister, he was interviewed by Walter Cronkite, who asked him who his heroes were. Ky candidly replied that there was only one figure in history he saw as his role model: Adolf Hitler, and he went on to speak with admiration of how Hitler really knew how to get a job done. CBS refused to air that part of the interview. Cronkite himself eventually got sick of following the offical line, and came out against the war, on air, after the Tet Offensive.
The closest the U.S. Congress came to declaring war on North Vietnam was the Gulf of Tonkien Resolution, which pretty much gave President Johnson carte blanche to wage war. The Resolution, which passed with just two members of Congress opposing it, got its name from an incident in which the North Vietnamese fired on a U.S. Navy vessel in Vietnamese waters. The only thing is, it gradually became more and more certain that this had probably never happened. The ship’s radar had indicated that dozens or hundreds of torpedoes had made near misses without the ship suffering any harm. In fact, it seems fairly clear that an ill-trained radar operator had merely tracked the movements of a school of fish.
The U.S. government never was very consistent or clear about what we were fighting for. There is a well-known documentary written by Andy Rooney called “An Essay on War”. In it there is a string of clips of American Presidents from Eisenhower to Nixon explaining what we wanted in Vietnam. Everyone of them had a different answer. Nixon said that we were there to insure “self-determination”–and always had been.
Americans like the idea of winning wars but they do not like of losing after a noble struggle, or even of giving up in a draw. That had already happened in Korea and, after there was fighting in the streets of Saigon during the Tet Offensive, plenty of Americans concluded we couldn’t even come out even, so we might as well quit while we were behind.
Many other Americans were convinced that we could win the war, but that “the politicians won’t let us”, so we might as well give up. This complaint about the politicians largely meant that the Johnson and Nixon adminsitrations declined to take the more aggressive suggestions of the Pentagon, such as that the U.S. should use strategic bombing to destroy the intricate system of irrigation canals on which the North Vietnamese depended for survival. The result of an all-out air strike on the irrigation network would have resulted in flooding large parts of the country, and causing starvation of astronomical proportions.
It often appeared to people that the U.S. was not interested in winning the war, or in negotiating a peace treaty, but in merely delaying until we gave up with what we tried to convince ourselves was dignity. This came to be largely true; at the start of the Paris Peace Talks, discussion over what kind of table the negotiators would sit at took over a year. In the end, all that was negotiated were some technical points about the U.S. withdrawal.
H. R. Haldemann’s diaries include his notes of meetings with Richard Nixon early in his first administration in which Nixon said that he did not expect or intend to win in Vietnam, and planned to withdraw shortly after he was re-elected. This is a plan he kept to. Strinkingly, the fact that one of the most powerful men in the executive branch of government, a man who was a close personal advisor of the President, revealed that the President allowed thousands of Americans (and Vietnamese) to be killed purely because it would help his re-election, was not regarded as big news by the mass media when it came out.
People concerned about the Constitutionally-guaranteed separation of powers feared that an “imperial presidency” was developing. War never was declared by Congress. When the House considered Articles of Impeachment against President Nixon, one which was considered was that he had violated the law by secretly ordering the bombing Cambodia, a nation with which we were not at war. This article was not adopted, largely because it was decided that the issue of just where the President’s war making powers begin and end was far too confused to take up at the time.
Scandals within the United States concerning the government response to protests turned many people against the government’s policies. Of the four unarmed “protesters” shot to death at Kent State, one was getting out of his car with his arms full of books in a parking lot hundreds of yards away from the rally. Protesters changed “the whole world is watching” as the Chicago police went berserk at the 1968 Democratic Convention, pounding on and macing people such as Hugh Hefner, Warren Beatty, and people in the neighborhood who simply opened their front doors to see what all of the screaming was about.
Scandals in Vietnam revealed that some U.S. troops were involved in atrocities, that the government knew about it, and the government did its level best to keep it secret. Senator Daniel Inouye credited the news of the My Lai massacre, and the response of many hawks that the women were raped and murdered “had it coming” for causing him to reverse his position on the war.
There’s an old episode of WKRP in Cincinnati in which Venus is revealed to be a desserter. At the conclusion of the story, it comes out that he cracked up after seeing South Vietnamese soldiers throw a prisoner of war out of a helictoper in midair. Thus is history rewritten: in the scandal which was reported during the war, it was said to be Green Berets who were murdering P.O.W.s this way. (Incidentally, I was in the 8th grade at a Catholic school when that story came out. When she heard about it in class, my teacher, an outspoken hawk who thought that the My Lai massacre had been justified, thought this story was funny as hell).
Summing up: the Vietnam War came at a time in American history when people had better access to news than ever before, and were in a mood where they felt more free to speak their minds than before. This led a lot of people to feel a need to express themselves when they saw things about the war which were objectionable–and there were just a whole bunch of those.
Vietnam still calls itself a socialist state, but they no longer claim to be Marxist, as far as I can tell. For example, see the following page from the Vietnamese tourism web site on foreign investment:
http://www.vietnamtourism.com/e_pages/business_eco/law/foreign_invest/legal_forinvest_1034td.htm
This page talks about profits, taxes on profits and re-investment. Marxist states do not allow profits - the government does not allow the proceeds of business to go to individuals or corporations.
Reported