Crisis of Confidence: The American Military Failure in Vietnam - Essay Example

Your Your Crisis of Confidence: The American Military Failure in Vietnam The war in Vietnam was different from most of the other conflicts in American history. There was not a clear point of entry into the conflict – a stark contrast with the horrific night of Pearl Harbor, for example. The rationale behind United States involvement lacked the hearty sentiments of Manifest Destiny or the hated enemies Kaiser Bill or Adolf Hitler. It may have been these murky beginnings that made the war such an unpopular one, and a topic that enervated rather than energized the American public. It may have been this lack of unity regarding the Vietnam conflict that offended President Johnson, who sought to turn the conflict around and make it a positive factor in American society. The fact that the United States never had a real sense of purpose in this war, and the fact that the Vietnamese were able to bog down the American military, are the key reasons why the Vietnamese were victorious in this conflict. The conflict, of course, began when the French decided to release their colonial claims to Vietnam. The French army was driven from Vietnam in 1954, resulting in the Geneva Peace Accords. This created a temporary partition of Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, until 1956, when nationwide elections would be held. While the Communist powers in the Soviet Union and China did want the entire nation of Vietnam to become Communist, they predicted that the 1956 election would accomplish their aims without bringing the United States into the conflict (The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975). Rather than initiate another conflict similar to Korea, the American government began a concerted effort to win the political minds of those living to the south of the Communist zone. A major part of this effort was the creation of SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization). Initially, the American efforts were successful: the 1956 elections brought Ngo Dinh Diem, a firm opponent of Communism, to power in South Vietnam (Kaiser, p. 36). However, Diem claimed that the North Vietnamese were preparing to take the southern half of Vietnam by force, and the Americans began aiding his military maneuvers against the northern half in 1957. Diem used a variety of brutal internal measures in South Vietnam to quell the Communist insurgency, including Law 10/59, which permitted authorities to hold anyone who was suspected of being a Communist indefinitely, without bringing charges (Kaiser, p. 41). Over time, Diem became increasingly autocratic, which made him an increasingly difficult leader for the United States to support. In response, the Communist insurgency began to increase the amount of violence in its protests (The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975). The National Liberation Front was the official organization for those in South Vietnam who wanted to overthrow Diem’s government. Created on December 20, 1960, the NLF had only one requirement for membership: applicants had to be opposed to Diem’s rule. While the American government scorned the NLF as a mere puppet of the North Vietnamese Communist government, giving it the slur “Viet Cong,” there are many who were inside and outside the NLF who claimed that the majority of its members were not Communists – thus showing how unpopular Diem had actually become (Kaiser, p. 44). President Kennedy’s policy toward Diem was neither full assistance nor full rejection: the United States supplied advisers and equipment to the South Vietnamese government, but did not commit a large-scale complement of troops to assist Diem’s military in its conflict against the NLF (The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975). This level of assistance was not sufficient to keep the South Vietnamese government stable. After Diem’s brother led raids on the Buddhist pagodas throughout the country, claiming that the priests were harboring Communists, there were protests throughout the country, including one in Saigon where a Buddhist priest set himself on fire. The Americans gave some of Diem’s generals support for a coup, and so on November 1, 1963, Diem and his brother were captured and later killed. On November 22, however, President Kennedy was assassinated, bringing Vice President Lyndon Johnson into the role of Chief Executive (The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975). At this point in time, there were 16,000 American military advisers stationed in Vietnam. However, the political difficulties in South Vietnam did not seem to be abating, which made many wonder what the effectiveness of those advisers was. Even before the attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin, the new President was already planning a significant increase in the American military presence in South Vietnam. Matters accelerated on August 2 and 4, 1964, when the North Vietnamese attacked an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was the American political response, which gave the President wide-ranging executive powers to use during times of war. The military response to the attacks was a series of limited air attacks against North Vietnam. There was much dissent inside the government as to how militarily involved the next steps should be – the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged an expanded air campaign over the north, while the civilians in government wanted to be more choosy about the bombing targets. While all of this arguing was going on, the NLF attacked two American army installations in the south, which led President Johnson to institute Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign, and to send significant troop increases into the south (The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975). By the end of 1965, there were 184,000 troops in Vietnam (Bailey and Kennedy, p. 872). This American adjustment in strategy led to a change in the Communist strategy as well. Because the Communists knew that the American government did not have a specific vision behind its military intervention in Vietnam, they believed that they would be able to defeat the technologically and numerically superior American forces by drawing the war out, and getting the United States into a slow, bogged-down conflict that would wear away at public opinion and political will. At the same time, the South Vietnamese became increasingly unreliable allies. After the coup that toppled Diem, the South Vietnamese government changed over and over. Rather than admit that the United States was supporting a government that had only the shakiest claims of being a stable democracy, however, President Johnson listened to the shrill claims of the far right, who claimed that if the United States pulled out of Vietnam, it would “drive America’s first line of defense back to Waikiki Beach, in Hawaii, or even to the coast of California” (Bailey and Kennedy, p. 873). By 1968, there were more than 500,000 troops in Vietnam, and the annual cost of the war was over $30 billion. However, there was no apparent end to the conflict that anyone could see. Just as important to the American defeat as the change in Vietnamese military tactics was the draining loss of morale at home. Across the world, opinion turned against the United States. There were several countries that sent home their Peace Corps volunteers. The French (who, ironically, had been the ones to lose to Vietnam in the first place) ordered NATO to leave France in 1966 (Bailey and Kennedy, p. 873). Domestically, there were many universities that had “teach-ins” as early as 1965, and as time progressed, these protests became enormous, particularly as the draft took away more and more of America’s young men (Johnson, p. 142). Many draftees fled to Canada, so that they would not have to fight in Vietnam, and others risked imprisonment by burning their draft cards in public protests. Protesters marched by the hundreds of thousands in New York City and San Francisco. Televisions teemed with images of American soldiers burning straw huts that belonged to some of the poorest people on the planet and dropping napalm on groups of civilians (Small 1998, p. 141). When the war was not on television, the hearings held by Senator Fulbright, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, featured famous public figures delivering antiwar sentiments in Senate hearings. Because of the sense that the government had made the war seem more winnable than it actually was, the idea of a “credibility gap” between the government and the American people grew in popularity (Bailey and Kennedy, p. 874). The opposition party in America was not the only source of doubt and division. Even the Johnson administration had misgivings about the American military’s capability to keep South Vietnam from falling to the Communists in the north. By early 1968, the Vietnam War had become the longest foreign war in the country’s history. There had been over 100,000 American troops that were killed or wounded. The United States had already dropped more bombs on Vietnam than had been dropped on all of the Axis powers during World War II (Bailey and Kennedy, p. 875). During the long duration of this war, the government had never communicated the purpose of the hostilities to the American public, and so the critics were blasting the government with questions about the value America was getting for the blood that was being shed and the money that was being drained by the conflict (Small 1994, p. 111). The Tet Offensive was the Vietnamese military campaign that exposed all of the claims of an imminent American victory as falsehoods. The Viet Cong attacked twenty-seven cities in South Vietnam, including Saigon, at once. While they were defeated and suffered heavy losses, President Johnson’s strategy of “gradual escalation” was shown to be deeply flawed. The American military leadership made a stunning request for 200,000 additional troops, and even President Johnson seemed willing to put the brakes on the war effort. This willingness was increased by a surprising challenge within Johnson’s own party in the 1968 Presidential election. Eugene McCarthy, a Senator from Minnesota, entered as a peace candidate. He won 42% of the vote in the 1968 New Hampshire primary, and seemed headed for a shocking victory against a sitting President. However, immediately after the primary, Robert F. Kennedy entered the Democratic contest, also as a peace candidate, relegating McCarthy to the side of the race (Bailey and Kennedy, p. 876). President Johnson seemed in a cul-de-sac of his own construction. How could he emerge from the Vietnam conflict honorably, but not sacrifice the chances of the Democratic Party in the 1968 election? On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced that American troop levels would freeze, allowing the South Vietnamese to take more responsibility for their own security. At the same time, peace negotiations would open with the North Vietnamese. Most stunning of all was President Johnson’s announcement that he would not seek the Democratic nomination in the 1968 election. While this announcement quieted many of the protests in the United States, the diplomatic negotiations quickly melted down over squabbles over such minutiae as the shape of the conference table (Bailey and Kennedy, p. 877). The 1968 Presidential election gave America Richard Nixon. The “Nixon Doctrine” was one of his first policy statements, namely that while the United States would honor its existing commitments in defense, in the future allies would have to fight their own wars without large numbers of American ground troops supporting them. Nixon’s idea to “Vietnamize” the war involved a gradual withdrawal of the 540,000 American troops in South Vietnam, along with an extensive training program for the South Vietnamese, so they could shoulder the defense of their own country (Bailey and Kennedy, p. 882). Nixon’s solution to the antiwar protesters at home was surprisingly condescending: he first issued an appeal to the “silent majority” – those middle-class workers sitting at home in the evening, watching television, not taking part in protests of any kind, but who supported the war effort. He sent Vice President Spiro Agnew out to deliver vicious attacks on the “misleading” media and the “effete corps of impudent snobs” and “nattering nabobs of negativism” who wanted a faster withdrawal from Vietnam (Small 1994, p. 202). The statistics do not lie, however: by January, 1970, the Vietnam War had seen over 40,000 American soldiers killed and over 250,000 wounded. These numbers were overshadowed by reports of such atrocities by American soldiers as the slaughter of women and children in My Lai. The military itself showed signs of weakness, including drug abuse and mutiny. Despite Nixon’s attempt to widen the conflict by invading Cambodia, long seen as a staging ground for invading South Vietnam from the west, Nixon was eager to get to the peace table, and out of Vietnam. The end result of those negotiations left North Vietnam in occupation of 30% of the south, with 145,000 troops. The United States agreed to withdraw all troops. What Nixon called an honorable peace was merely an American retreat. In retrospect, there were two primary reasons that the United States lost the Vietnam War. The first was that the United States never had a vision of why it was fighting the war in the first place, and therefore never had a clear sense of what would constitute a victory. All of the war policies were driven by government reaction to the opinions of those in opposition. The second was that the Vietnamese knew that the Americans did not have the stomach to fight a guerrilla war, even with vastly superior numbers. Because of this, the Vietnamese could retreat into the jungles and rice paddies, and wait for the Americans to tire of the mysterious, unseen enemy, and slink out of the country. Works Cited Bailey, Thomas, and Kennedy, David. The American Pageant: A History of the Republic. Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1987. Johnson, C.A. and Carroll, J. The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004. Kaiser, D. American tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the origins of the Vietnam War. Boston: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000. Small, M. Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. Trenton: Rutgers University Press, 1994. ________. Johnson, Nixon and the Doves. Trenton: Rutgers University Press, 1988. The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975. Accessed 11 October 2006 online at http://vietnam.vassar.edu/overview.html. VanDeMark, B. Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Read More