lessons of the vietnam war essay

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Lessons from the Vietnam War

John Marciano is professor emeritus of education at the State University of New York, Cortland, and a longtime activist, teacher, and trade unionist.

This article is adapted from The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? (Monthly Review Press, 2016).

The Vietnam War was an example of imperial aggression. According to historian Michael Parenti: “Imperialism is what empires are all about. Imperialism is what empires do,” as “one country brings to bear…economic and military power upon another country in order to expropriate [its] land, labor, natural resources, capital and markets.” Imperialism ultimately enriches the home country’s dominant class. The process involves “unspeakable repression and state terror,” and must rely repeatedly “upon armed coercion and repression.” The ultimate aim of modern U.S. imperialism is “to make the world safe” for multinational corporations. When discussing imperialism, “the prime unit of analysis should be the economic class rather than the nation-state.” 1

U.S. imperial actions in Vietnam and elsewhere are often described as reflecting “national interests,” “national security,” or “national defense.” Endless U.S. wars and regime changes, however, actually represent the class interests of the powerful who own and govern the country. Noam Chomsky argues that if one wishes to understand imperial wars, therefore, “it is a good idea to begin by investigating the domestic social structure. Who sets foreign policy? What interest do these people represent? What is the domestic source of their power?” 2

The United States Committed War Crimes, Including Torture

The war was waged “against the entire Vietnamese population,” designed to terrorize them into submission. The United States “made South Vietnam a sea of fire as a matter of policy, turning an entire nation into a target. This is not accidental but intentional and intrinsic to the U.S.’s strategic and political premises.” In such an attack “against an entire people…barbarism can be the only consequence of [U.S.] tactics,” conceived and organized by “the true architects of terror,” the “respected men of manners and conventional views who calculate and act behind desks and computers rather than in villages in the field.” 3 The U.S. abuse of Vietnamese civilians and prisoners of war was strictly prohibited by the Geneva Convention, which the United States signed. U.S. officials and media pundits continue to assert that torture is a violation of “our values.” This is not true. Torture is as American as apple pie, widely practiced in wars and prisons.

Washington Lied

The war depended on government lies. Daniel Ellsberg exposed one such lie that had a profound impact on the eventual course of the conflict: the official story of the Tonkin Gulf crisis of August 1964. President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told the public that the North Vietnamese, for the second time in two days, had attacked U.S. warships on “routine patrol in international waters”; that this was clearly a “deliberate” pattern of “naked aggression”; that the evidence for the second attack, like the first, was “unequivocal”; that the attack had been “unprovoked”; and that the United States, by responding in order to deter any repetition, intended no wider war. All of these assurances were untrue. 4

The War Was a Crime, Not Just a Mistake

Since the end of the war in 1975, there has been a concerted effort by U.S. officials, the corporate media, and influential intellectuals to portray U.S. actions as a “noble cause” that went astray. American military scholar and historian Christian Appy profoundly disagrees, arguing that the findings of the Pentagon Papers and other documents provide “ample evidence to contradict this interpretation…. The United States did not inadvertently slip into the morass of war; it produced the war quite deliberately.” 5

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Condemned the War—and Was Vilified For It

In a historic speech at Riverside Church in Manhattan in April 1967, Dr. King courageously confronted bitter and uncomfortable truths about the war and U.S. society: “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.” 6

King’s magnificent speech, relatively unknown in the United States today, provoked an immediate backlash from the political and corporate media establishment and from civil rights leaders. Life magazine denounced it as “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” A Harris poll taken in May 1967 revealed that 73 percent of Americans opposed his antiwar position, including 50 percent of African Americans. 7 The New York Times strongly condemned King, calling his effort to link civil rights and opposition to the war a “disservice to both. The moral issues in Vietnam are less clear-cut than he suggests.” The Washington Post claimed that some of his assertions were “sheer inventions of unsupported fantasy,” and that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people.” 8

The Media Did Not Oppose the War, Only How It Was Fought

The assertion that the mainstream media opposed and undermined the war effort is one of the great myths of the Vietnam conflict. They endorsed U.S. support of French colonialism and only emerged as tactical critics of the war after the Tet Offensive in early 1968. The corporate media never challenged the fundamental premises of this imperial war.

The First Antiwar Protests Came from the Merchant Marine Services

Opposition to U.S. intervention in Vietnam did not begin with student protests in the mid-1960s, but with American merchant mariners in the fall of 1945. They had been diverted from bringing U.S. troops home from Europe to transport French troops to Vietnam to reclaim that colony. Some of these merchant mariners vigorously condemned the transport “to further the imperialist policies of foreign governments,” and a group from among the crews of four ships condemned the U.S. government for helping to “subjugate the native population of Vietnam.” 9

Some two decades later, the most important opposition to the American War would come within the military itself—including criticism by Generals Matthew Ridgeway, David Shoup, James Gavin, and Hugh Hester. The latter called the war “immoral and unjust,” an act of U.S. aggression. In 1966, Shoup stated that if the United States “had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own.” The generals all signed a New York Times antiwar advertisement in 1967, and Shoup and Hester supported and spoke at rallies sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW). Because of their efforts, the FBI investigated them under Presidents Johnson and Nixon. 10

Marine combat veteran, poet, and activist W. D. Ehrhart spoke for thousands of vets who fought in the war and came home to challenge it:

I’d learned that the eighty-eight years of French colonial rule had been harsh and cruel; that the Americans had supported Ho Chi Minh and his Vietminh guerillas with arms and equipment and training during World War Two, and in return, Ho’s forces had provided the Americans with intelligence and had helped to rescue downed American pilots; that Ho had spent years trying to gain American support for Vietnamese independence; that at the end of World War Two, the United States had supported the French claim to Indochina; that North and South Vietnam were nothing more than an artificial construction of the Western powers, created at Geneva in 1954. I’d had to learn it all on my own, most of it years after I’d left Vietnam. 11

The War Provoked Strong Working-Class Opposition

Labor studies scholar Penny Lewis counters a number of misconceptions about the anti-war movement in her Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks , particularly the false view that working-class Americans were “largely supportive of the war and largely hostile to the numerous movements for social change taking place at the time.” In fact, “Working-class opposition to the war was significantly more widespread than is remembered and parts of the movement found roots in working-class communities and politics. By and large, the greatest support for the war came from the privileged elite, despite the visible dissention of a minority of its leaders and youth.” 12

As the war deepened, so did an antiwar movement within the working class. It included the rank-and-file union members, working-class veterans who joined and helped “to lead the movement when they returned stateside; [and] working-class GIs who refused to fight; and the deserters who walked away.” Especially after the Tet Offensive in early 1968, the antiwar movement “formed deeper roots among people of color, religious communities,” and students who attended non-elite campuses. 13

The domestic antiwar movement was the largest in U.S. history, and the October 1969 Moratorium Against the War alone was the greatest single antiwar protest ever recorded in this country. The movement was deepened and strengthened by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), that in January 1966 issued a public statement against the war—a courageous dissent that nearly bankrupted it financially. SNCC called U.S. involvement “racist and imperialist.” The murder of SNCC activist and Navy veteran Sammy Younge showed that the organization’s role was not to fight in Vietnam, but to struggle within the United States for freedoms denied to African Americans. SNCC accordingly affirmed its support for draft resisters. Reflecting the national view at the time, most African Americans strongly disagreed with SNCC’s stand on the war and draft resistance. 14

Though miniscule when compared to the astronomical level of violence in Vietnam, antiwar violence by college youth received more attention from the media and the public. In fact, however, it was an extremely small part of an activist antiwar movement that “numbered more than 9,400 protest incidents recorded during the Vietnam era, as well as thousands of demonstrations, vigils, letter writing [campaigns], teach-ins, mass media presentations, articles and books [and petitioning] congressional representatives.” 15 Added to these activities was an explosion of antiwar news sources across the country, beyond college campuses. There were countless antiwar papers published by active-duty soldiers and veterans who opposed the war, such as Vietnam GI , the VVAW paper.

Appeals to Support the Troops Should Be Critically Examined

President Obama and the 2015 official commemoration have urged citizens to support and honor those who served in Vietnam—an appeal that certainly does not extend to the antiwar activists of the VVAW. This charge to support the military in Vietnam—and all wars since—implicitly asks citizens to support uncritically any U.S. conflict. As the war continued, the VVAW rejected such a view, in the face of condemnation from prominent public officials, the American Legion, and Veterans of Foreign Wars.

For example, although President Ronald Reagan called on Americans to honor the troops, he showed his true colors when it came to programs to aid those scarred by the Vietnam conflict. His “first act in office was to freeze hiring in the [Veterans] Readjustment Counseling Program. He soon moved to eliminate all Vietnam veteran outreach programs, including an employment-training program for disabled veterans.” 16

The My Lai massacre offers a concrete case to test the official charge that citizens should support the military in times of war. Kenneth Hodge, one of the U.S. soldiers who participated in the massacre, insisted years later that “there was no crime committed”:

As a professional soldier I had been taught and instructed to carry out the orders that were issued by the superiors. At no time did it ever cross my mind to disobey or to refuse to carry out an order that was issued by my superiors. I felt that they (Charlie Company) were able to carry out the assigned task, the orders, that meant killing small kids, killing women…. I feel we carried out the orders in a moral fashion, the orders of destroying the village, …killing people in the village, and I feel we did not violate any moral standards. 17

There is no bridge that can span the chasm between Hodge and those soldiers who refused orders to kill people at My Lai; and between Hodge and pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who landed his helicopter in the midst of the massacre and saved Vietnamese who certainly would have been killed. Hodge’s defense should also be compared with journalist Jonathan Schell’s comment about My Lai: “With the report of the…massacre, we face a new situation. It is no longer possible for us to say that we did not know…. For if we learn to accept this, there is nothing we will not accept.” 18

Real support for the troops should not consist of cheap flyovers at sporting events; corporate campaigns to raise funds for veterans that are pennies on the dollar alongside vast profits from military contracts; performing empty flag-waving gestures while supporting political efforts in Washington to cut funds for wounded and disabled veterans and other needed programs; or assuring veterans that the war was a noble cause when it was not.

My Lai Was a Massacre, Not an “Incident”

The most publicized U.S. atrocity of the war, the slaughter of unarmed residents of the hamlet of My Lai in the village of Son My on March 16, 1968, was a massacre—not an “incident,” as it is called in the official Vietnam War Commemoration sponsored by the Department of Defense. It lists the death toll “at ‘more than 200,'” and singles out only Lieutenant Calley, “as if the deaths of all those Vietnamese civilians, carried out by dozens of men at the behest of higher command, could be the fault of just one junior officer.” 19

For historian Gabriel Kolko, My Lai “is simply the foot soldier’s direct expression of the…fire and terror that his superiors in Washington devise and command from behind desks…. The real war criminals in history never fire guns [and] never suffer discomfort. What is illegitimate and immoral, is the entire war and its intrinsic character.” Regarding the home front reception to the My Lai massacre, he reminds us that the “rather triumphant welcome various political and veterans organizations gave Lieutenant Calley reveals that terror and barbarism have their followers and admirers at home as well as in Vietnam.” 20

Regarding My Lai, the war, and the United States, historian Kendrick Oliver concludes: “This is not a society which really wanted to know about the violence of the war that its armed forces were waging in Vietnam.” Many Americans “perceived they had more in common with…Calley than with any of his victims…. It was the lieutenant…who became the object of public sympathy, not the inhabitants of My Lai whom he had hastened to death, and the orphans and widows he made of many of the rest.” 21

Ecocide Is an Essential Legacy of the War

The horrific and illegal chemical warfare against the Vietnamese was defined powerfully and precisely by biologist Arthur Galston: “It seems to me that the willful and permanent destruction of environment…ought…to be considered as a crime against humanity, to be designated by the term ecocide .” 22 The devastating environmental health effects of the war continue for Vietnamese and U.S. veterans. Arthur Westing, the leading U.S. authority on ecological damage during the war, addressed these effects at an Agent Orange symposium in 2002. The “Second Indochina War of 1961–1975 (the ‘Vietnam Conflict’; the ‘American War’) stands out today as the [model] of war-related environmental abuse.” 23

The U.S. Government Does Not “Hate War”—It Loves It

President Obama’s claim in his Vietnam commemoration speech—that Americans “hate war” and “only fight to protect ourselves because it’s necessary”—is the latest in a long line of fantastical pronouncements by U.S. officials. Even an elementary knowledge of U.S. wars since the founding of the nation would dispel this delusion. These include the genocidal Indian Wars that lasted more than a century until 1890; wars of aggression against Cuban, Philippine, and Puerto Rican independence struggles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and the overthrow of forty-one governments in Latin America between 1898 and 1994. 24 There is also Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq (twice, in 1991 and 2003, in addition to genocidal economic sanctions in between), and Afghanistan, with the latter two both still underway, and many more documented in the Congressional Research Service’s important study, released in September 2014, that tallied hundreds of U.S. military interventions. As Veterans for Peace note on their website: “America has been at war 222 out of 239 years since 1776. Let that sink in for a moment.” Since the end of the shooting war in Vietnam in April 1975, virtually every calendar year has seen the presence of U.S. military forces abroad, in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe. A number of these nations have seen multiple U.S. military interventions under various presidents over the past forty years since the end of the Vietnam War. 25 The historical record, therefore, reveals a nation that is wedded to war.

Vietnamese Resistance to U.S. Aggression was Justified

Nguyen Thi Binh, head of the Vietnamese delegation to the 1968 Paris Peace Conference, declared that the war of resistance against America was “the fiercest struggle in the history of Vietnam,” forced upon a people who did not provoke or threaten the United States. During the Second World War, Vietnam “was on the side of the Allies and embedded the spirit of democracy and freedom of the Declaration of Independence of America in the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence and constitution.” Despite this fact, the United States “attempted to replace France and impose its rule over Vietnam.” The Vietnamese understood their country “was one,” and their “sacred aspiration was independence, freedom, and unification.” They always believed that they “have the right to choose the political regime for their country without foreign intervention.” 26

The History of the War Is a Struggle for Memory

A practical lesson of the war is offered by Vietnam veteran and sociologist Jerry Lembcke, author of the important book Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam , who writes that the “vast majority of Vietnam War veterans would know more about the war today if they had spent their months of deployment stateside in a classroom with Howard Zinn.” And what should be the lesson for young people who wish to understand the American war? “That the veteran…might today be a better source…had he stayed home from Vietnam and read some history books; [and] the student, whose education might be better served by reading a good history book about the war than interviewing the veteran.” 27

After every war that the United States has fought, a new chapter is added to history textbooks, one that interprets the conflict for succeeding generations. The new narratives stress the necessity of its involvement and America’s role and conduct during the war. Some describe the excesses and even the criminal behavior of the U.S. military, but never define these as such or acknowledge their central place in the conduct of the war. U.S. history textbooks essentially portray U.S. aggression against Vietnam as a failed defense of democracy and freedom; it was a “mistake” and a “tragedy,” with noble goals. The thesis that the conflict was an illegal act of state aggression is considered unworthy of critical examination. The parameters established by these texts do not allow students to consider the possibility that the Vietnamese resistance was a justifiable liberation struggle against foreign aggression and a brutally authoritarian regime.

Noam Chomsky’s conclusion on the nature of the war and its relationship to the educational system captures the essence of the past and present textbook studies. Simply replace Southeast Asia with Afghanistan or Iraq, and his thoughts in 1966 on schools and society remain accurate and relevant:

At this moment of national disgrace, as American technology is running amuck in Southeast Asia, a discussion of American schools can hardly avoid noting the fact that these schools are the first training ground for the troops that will enforce the muted, unending terror of the status quo of a projected American century; for the technicians who will be developing the means for extension of American power; for the intellectuals who can be counted on, in significant measure, to provide the intellectual justification for this particular form of barbarism and to decry the irresponsibility and lack of sophistication of those who will find all of this intolerable and revolting. 1

Forty years after the American war in Vietnam ended in 1975, the central and most critical issue is the “struggle for memory,” an ideological war over the most accurate and truthful story of the conflict. Whose ideas about the war will prevail? This struggle will help determine how we, the people, will respond to present and future U.S. international conflicts. If citizens are to understand the role of U.S. governmental and corporate elites in initiating the current endless wars, they must develop an accurate and comprehensive understanding of the history of the war in Vietnam. Such an analysis will provide the critical tools with which to counter the hyper-patriotism of the official Vietnam commemoration, whose lessons are based on the dominant and false story of U.S. beneficence: a nation forever faithful in its quest for justice that always follows a righteous path in its wartime conduct. Another story must be told: that of a decades-long reign of terror against the people of Vietnam, a shameful war that no government-sanctioned lesson or eloquent rhetoric can hide.

• ↩ Michael Parenti’s argument here is a synthesis of “ What Do Empires Do? ” 2010, http://michaelparenti.org, and Against Empire (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995), 23. Parenti documents this history in great detail in a number of other books, including The Face of Imperialism , Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies , and The Sword and the Dollar . In a note to the author, Noam Chomsky cautioned about reading the general argument about imperialism too narrowly; it was sufficient as “a general statement on imperialism, but…misleading about Vietnam. It will be read as though the US wanted to exploit Vietnam’s resources…. The concern was the usual one (Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua, others) that successful independent development in Vietnam might inspire others to follow the same course.”
• ↩ Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War (New York: New Press, 2003), 6, 93, 98. It is a testament to the strength of the dominant view of American foreign policy that Chomsky, an internationally renowned scholar and intellectual, was virtually unknown to nearly all of the more than six thousand students I taught over the course of thirty-one years at the State University of New York, Cortland. Some had heard of him, but it was rare to find a student who had read any of his writings. In addition to Chomsky’s many books, readers should examine William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 2000) and G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013).
• ↩ Gabriel Kolko, “War Crimes and The Nature of the Vietnam War,” in Richard Falk, Gabriel Kolko, and Robert Jay Lifton, eds., Crimes of War (New York: Vintage, 1971), 412–13; Kolko, “On the Avoidance of Reality,” Crimes of War , 15.
• ↩ Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets (New York: Penguin, 2002), 12.
• ↩ Christian Appy, Working Class War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 253.
• ↩ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “ Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence ,” April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City, available at http://commondreams.org.
• ↩ Edward Morgan, What Really Happened to the 1960s (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2010), 76; Daniel S. Lucks, Selma to Saigon (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky Press, 2014), 203.
• ↩ New York Times , April 7, 1967; Washington Post , April 6, 1967.
• ↩ Michael Gillen, “Roots of Opposition: The Critical Response to U.S. Indochina Policy, 1945–1954,” Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1991, 122.
• ↩ Robert Buzzanco, “The American Military’s Rationale against the Vietnam War,” Political Science Quarterly 101, no. 4 (1986): 571.
• ↩ W. D. Ehrhart, Passing Time (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1989), 161–62.
• ↩ Penny Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks (Ithaca, NY: ILR, 2013), 4, 7.
• ↩ Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks , 45.
• ↩ Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks , 92; Lucks, Selma to Saigon , 3.
• ↩ Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973), 514, 48.
• ↩ D. Michael Shafer, “The Vietnam Combat Experience: The Human Legacy,” in The Legacy: The Vietnam War in the American Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 97.
• ↩ Quoted in Michael Bolton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai (New York: Viking, 1992), 371.
• ↩ Jonathan Schell, “Comment,” New Yorker , December 20, 1969, 27.
• ↩ Nick Turse, “ Misremembering America’s Wars, 2003–2054 ,” TomDispatch, February 18, 2014, http://tomdispatch.com.
• ↩ Kolko, “War Crimes,” 414; “Avoidance,” 12.
• ↩ Kendrick Oliver, The My Lai Massacre in American History and Memory (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006), 8–9.
• ↩ Quoted in Erwin Knoll and Judith Nies McFadden, War Crimes and the American Conscience (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 71.
• ↩ Arthur Westing, “Return to Vietnam: The Legacy of Agent Orange,” lecture at Yale University, April 26, 2002; Westing, Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War (Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1974), 22.
• ↩ Greg Grandin, “ The War to Start All Wars: The 25th Anniversary of the Forgotten Invasion of Panama ,” TomDispatch, December 23, 2014. See also Grandin’s excellent Empire’s Workshop (New York: Metropolitan), 2006.
• ↩ Barbara Salazar Torreon, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2014 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Office, 2014).
• ↩ Nguyen Thi Binh, “The Vietnam War and Its Lessons,” in Christopher Goscha and Maurice Vaisse, eds., The Vietnam War and Europe 1963–1973 (Brussels: Bruylant, 2003), 455–56.
• ↩ Jerry Lembcke, “ Why Students Should Stop Interviewing Vietnam Veterans ,” History News Network, May 27, 2013, http://historynewsnetwork.org.
• ↩ Noam Chomsky, “Thoughts on Intellectuals and the Schools,” Harvard Educational Review 36, no. 4 (1966): 485.

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Rethinking Schools

Non-Restricted Content

Lessons of the Vietnam War

Teaching the forgotten 50th anniversary.

By Bill Bigelow

There is a startling encounter in the Vietnam war documentary, Heartsand Minds , between producer Peter Davis and Walt Rostow, former adviser to President Johnson. Davis asks Rostow why the United States got involved in Vietnam. Rostow is incredulous: “Are you really asking me this goddamn silly question?” That’s “pretty pedestrian stuff,” he complains. But after several more expressions of disgust, Rostow finally answers, “The problem began in its present phase after the Sputnik, the launching of Sputnik, in 1957, October.”

Despite Rostow’s patronizing bluster, Davis’ question is not silly at all. It’s the fundamental question that a film — or teacher — should ask about the war. What’s silly is Rostow’s answer. Sputnik? 1957?

With one blow, the former adviser erases years of history to imply that somehow the Soviet Union was behind it all.

The “present phase” caveat notwithstanding, Rostow ignores the World War II cooperation between the United States and the Viet Minh; Ho Chi Minh’s repeated requests that the U.S. acknowledge Vietnamese sovereignty; the U.S. refusal to recognize the 1945 Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam; $2 billion in U.S. military support for the restoration of French domination, including the near-use of nuclear weapons during the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu, according to the Army’s own history of the war; and the well-documented U.S. subversion of the 1954 Geneva peace accords. All occurred before the launching of Sputnik.

Rostow’s historical amnesia is reflected in today’s major U.S. history textbooks, according to a new study by Jim Loewen of the University of Vermont [see the review of his book, LiesMyTeacherTold Me , p. 24.] Of the 12 textbooks Loewen studied, not a single one probes earlier than the 1950s to understand the origins of the war. Why was the United States at war in Vietnam, according to these texts? Loewen writes: “Most textbooks simply dodge the issue. Here is a representative analysis, from American Adventures : ‘Later in the 1950’s, war broke out in South Vietnam. This time the United States gave aid to the South Vietnamese government.’ ‘War broke out’ — what could be simpler!”

When teachers pattern our curricula after these kinds of non-explanatory explanations, we mystify the origins not just of the war in Vietnam, but of everything we teach. Students need to learn to distinguish explanations from descriptions, like “war broke out,” or “chaos erupted.” Thinking about social events as having concrete causes, constantly asking “Why?” and “In whose interests?” need to become critical habits of the mind for us and our students. It’s only through developing the tools of deep questioning that students can attempt to make sense of today’s global conflicts.

However, especially when teaching something like the war in Vietnam, bypassing explanation in favor of description can be seductive. After all, there’s so much stuff about the war in Vietnam: so many films, so many novels, short stories and poetry, so many veterans who can come in and speak to the class. These are all fine and important resources, but unless built on a foundation of causes for the war, using these can be more voyeuristic than educational; they can generate a kind of empty empathy.

The Missing Anniversary

The year 1995 is full of 50th anniversaries: the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps; the surrender of Germany, ending the war in Europe; the testing of the first atom bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico; the first use of atomic weapons against human beings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the final end of World War II, with the surrender of Japan; and the birth of the United Nations. However, one anniversary likely to be overlooked in this year of remembrance also had an enormous impact

on the course of world history: the Declaration of Independence of Vietnam, announced September 2, 1945 by Ho Chi Minh. If we in the United States had spent more time considering the origins of the war, perhaps we wouldn’t experience this commemorative omission.

A video I’ve found useful in prompting students to explore a bit of the history of Vietnam and the sources of U.S. involvement is the first episode of the PBS presentation, Vietnam: A Television History [available in many libraries]. Called “Roots of a War,” it offers an overview of Vietnamese resistance to French colonialism (which began in the mid-nineteenth century) and to the Japanese occupation during World War

II. My students find the video a bit dry, so in order for students not to feel overwhelmed by information, I stop it often to talk about key incidents and issues. Some of the images are powerful: Vietnamese men carrying white-clad Frenchmen on their backs, and French picture-postcards of the severed

heads of Vietnamese resisters — cards that troops sent home to sweethearts in Paris, as the narrator tells us, inscribed, “With kisses from Hanoi.” The goal of French colonialism is presented truthfully and starkly: “To transform Vietnam into a source of profit.” The narrator explains, “Exports of rice stayed high even if it meant the peasants starved.” Significantly, many of those who tell the story of colonialism and the struggle against it are Vietnamese. Instead of the nameless generic peasants of so many Hollywood Vietnam war movies, here, at least in part, Vietnamese get to tell their own stories.

Toward the end of the episode, Dr. Tran Duy Hung recounts the Vietnamese independence celebration in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh square following the defeat of the Japanese — and occurring on the very day of the formal Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, September 2, 1945: “I can say that the most moving moment was when President Ho Chi Minh

climbed the steps, and the national anthem was sung. It was the first time that the national anthem of Vietnam was sung in an official ceremony. Uncle Ho then read the Declaration of Independence, which was a short document. As he was reading, Uncle Ho stopped and asked, ‘Compatriots, can you hear me?’ This simple question went into the hearts of everyone there. After a moment of silence, they all shouted, ‘Yes, we hear you.’ And I can say that we did not just shout with our mouths, but with all our hearts. The hearts of over 400,000 people standing in the square then.” Dr. Hung recalls that moments later, a small plane began circling overhead and swooped down over the crowd. When people recognized the stars and stripes of the U.S. flag, they cheered enthusiastically, believing its presence to be a kind of independence ratification. The image of the 1945 crowd in Northern Vietnam applauding a U.S. military aircraft offers a poignant reminder of the historical could-have-beens.

Although this is not the episode’s conclusion, at this point I stop the video. What will be the response of the U.S. government? Will it recognize an independent Vietnam or stand by as France attempts to reconquer its lost colony? Or will the United States even aid France in this effort? This is a choice-point that would impact the course of human history, and through role play I want to bring it to life in the classroom. Of course, I could simply tell them what happened, or give them materials to read. But a role play that brings to life the perspectives of key social groups, allows students to experience , rather than just hear about aspects of this historical crossroads. As a prelude, we read the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, available in the fine collection, Vietnam and America:A Documented History , edited by Marvin Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn Young, and H. Bruce Franklin [New York: Grove Press, 1985], as well as in Vietnam: A History in Documents , edited by Gareth Porter [New York: New American Library, 1981].

Role Playing a Historic Choice

I include here the two core roles of the role play: members of the Viet Minh, and French government/business leaders. In teaching this period, I sometimes include other roles: U.S. corporate executives, labor activists, farmers, and British government officials deeply worried about their own colonial interests, as well as Vietnamese landlords allied with the French — this last, to reflect the class as well as anti-colonial dimension of the Vietnamese independence movement.

Each group has been invited to a meeting with President Truman — which, as students learn later, never took place — to present its position on the question of Vietnamese independence. I portray President Truman and chair the meeting.

Members of each group must explain:

• How they were affected by World War II?
• Why the United States should care what happens in Vietnam, along with any responsibilities the U.S. might have (and in the case of the French, why the United States should care what happens in France)?
• Whether the United States should feel threatened by communism in Vietnam, or in the case of the French leaders, France?
• What they want President Truman to do about the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence — support it, ignore it, oppose it?
• Whether the United States government should grant loans to the French, and if it supports loans, what strings should be attached?

Obviously, the more knowledge students have about pre-1945 Vietnam, France, and World War II in general, as well as the principles of communism, the more

sophisticated treatment they’ll be able to give to their roles. [An excellent film on U.S. Communism, Seeing Red , produced by Jim Klein and Julia Reichert, is available from New Day Films and can be helpful.] However, even without a thorough backgrounding, the lesson works fine to introduce the main issues in this important historical choice-point.

To work students into their roles, I may ask them to create an individual persona by writing an interior monologue — one’s inner thoughts — on their post-war hopes and fears. Students can read these to a partner, or share them in a small group.

In the meeting/debate, students-as-Viet Minh argue on behalf of national independence. They may remind Truman of the help that the Viet Minh gave to the Allies during World War II, denounce French colonialism, and recall the United States’ own history in throwing off European colonialism.

The students-as-French counter that the would-be Vietnamese rulers are Communists and therefore a threat to world peace. Like the Vietnamese, the French remind Truman that they too were World War II allies and are now in need of a helping

hand. In order to revive a prosperous and capitalist France, they need access to the resources of Vietnam. Because the United States has an interest in a stable Europe, one that is non-communist and open for investment, they should support French efforts to regain control of Vietnam.

I play a cranky Truman, and poke at inconsistencies in students’ arguments. I especially prod each side to question and criticize the other directly. [For suggestions on conducting a role play, see “Role Plays: Show, Don’t Tell,” in the Rethinking Schools publication, Rethinking Our Classrooms:Teaching for Equity and Justice , pp. 114-116.]

The structure of the meeting itself alerts students to the enormous power wielded by the United States government at the end of World War II, and that the government was maneuvering on a global playing field. As students will come to realize, U.S. policymakers would not decide the Vietnam question solely, if at all, on issues of morality, or even on issues related directly to Vietnam. As historian Gabriel Kolko writes in The Roots of American Foreign Policy , “even in 1945 the United States regarded Indo-China almost exclusively as the object of Great Power diplomacy and conflict. . . [A]t no time did the desires of the Vietnamese themselves assume a role in the shaping of United States policy.”

Following the whole-group debate, we shed our roles to debrief. I ask: What were some of the points brought out in discussion that you agreed with? Do you think Truman ever met with Vietnamese representatives? What would a U.S. president take into account in making a decision like this?

What did Truman decide? What powerful groups might seek to influence Vietnam policy? How should an important foreign policy question like this one be decided?

To discover what Truman did and why, we study a timeline drawn from a number of books on Vietnam, including the one by Kolko mentioned above, his Anatomy of a War [Pantheon, 1985], Marilyn Young’s The Vietnam Wars:1945-1990 [HarperCollins, 1991], The Pentagon Papers [Bantam, 1971], as well as excerpts from Chapter 18 of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States [HarperCollins, 1980]. It’s a complicated history involving not only the French and Vietnamese, but also Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist Chinese forces, the British, and Japanese. What becomes clear is that at the close of World War II, the United States was in a position to end almost 100 years of French domination in Vietnam. The French government was desperate for U.S. aid and would not have defied an American decision to support Vietnamese independence. Nevertheless, U.S. leaders chose a different route, ultimately contributing about $2 billion to the French effort to reconquer Vietnam.

While a separate set of decisions led to the commitment of U.S. troops in Vietnam, the trajectory was set in the period just after World War II. The insights students glean from this role play inform our study of Vietnam throughout the unit. We follow-up with a timeline tracing U.S. economic and military aid to France; a point-by-point study of the 1954 Geneva agreement ending the war between the French and Vietnamese; and from the perspective of peasants and plantation laborers in southern Vietnam, students evaluate the 1960 revolutionary platform of the National Liberation Front. Students later read a number of quotations from scholars and politicians offering opinions on why we fought in Vietnam. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon assert in almost identical language that the United States was safeguarding freedom and democracy in South Vietnam. President Kennedy: “For the last decade we have been helping the South Vietnamese to maintain their independence.” Johnson: “We want nothing for ourselves — only that the people of South Vietnam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way.” Students ponder these platitudes: If it were truly interested in Vietnam’s “independence,” why did the U.S. government support French colonialism?

On April 7, 1965, President Johnson gave a major policy speech on Vietnam at Johns Hopkins University. Here Johnson offered a detailed explanation for why the United States was fighting in Vietnam [included in TheViet-Nam Reader , edited by Marcus Raskin and Bernard Fall, pp. 343-350]. Embedded in the speech was his version of the origins of the war. As Johnson, I deliver large portions of the speech, and students as truth-seeking reporters pepper me with critical questions and arguments drawn from the role play and other readings and activities.

Following this session, they write a critique of LBJ’s speech. Afterwards, we evaluate how several newspapers and journals — The New York Times , The Oregonian , I.F. Stone’s Weekly — actually covered President Johnson’s address.

None of the above is meant to suggest the outlines of a comprehensive curriculum on the Vietnam war. Here, I’ve concentrated on the need for engaging students in making explanations for the origins of U.S. government policy toward Vietnam. But policy choices had intimate implications for many people’s lives, and through novels, short stories, poetry, interviews, and their own imaginations, students need also to explore the personal dimensions of diplomacy and political economy. And no study of the war would be complete without examining the dynamics of the massive movement to end that war. Especially when confronted with the horrifying images of slaughtered children in a film like Remember My Lai , or the anguished sobs of a young Vietnamese boy whose father has been killed, in Hearts and Minds , our students need to know that millions of people tried to put a stop to the suffering. And students should be encouraged to reflect deeply on which strategies for peace were most effective. [See the accompanying resource suggestions.]

If we take the advice of the Walt Rostows and the textbook writers, and begin our study of the Vietnam war in the late 1950s, it’s impossible to think intelligently about the U.S. role. The presidents said we were protecting the independence of “South Vietnam.” Students need to travel back at least as far as 1945 to think critically about the invention of the country of South Vietnam that was intended to justify its needed “protection.” The tens of thousands of U.S. deaths and the millions of Vietnamese deaths, along with the social and ecological devastation of Indochina require the harsh light of history to be viewed clearly. Among the many worthy 50th anniversaries this year, perhaps we can acknowledge another one that means so much to so many.

Included in:

Volume 9, No.3

Spring 1995.

Vietnam War: 6 personal essays describe the sting of a tragic conflict

The Vietnam War touched millions of lives. Within these personal essays from people who took part in the filming of The Vietnam War , are lessons about what happened, what it meant then and what we can learn from it now.

Long ago and far away, we fought a war in which more than 58,000 Americans died and hundreds of thousands of others were wounded. The war meant death for an estimated 3 million Vietnamese, North and South. The fighting dragged on for almost a decade, polarizing the American people, dividing the country and creating distrust of our government that remains with us today.

In one way or another, Vietnam has overshadowed every national security decision since.

We were told that our mission was to prevent South Vietnam from falling to communism. Very lofty. But the men I led as a young infantry platoon leader and later as a company commander weren’t fighting for that mission. Mostly draftees, they were terrific soldiers. They were fighting, I realized, for each other — to simply survive their year in-country and go home.

I had grown up as an “Army brat.” To me, the Army was like a second family. In Vietnam, the radio code word for our division’s infantry companies was family . A “rucksack outfit,” my company would disappear into the jungle, moving quietly, staying in the field for weeks. We all ate the same rations and endured the same heat, humidity, mosquitoes, leeches, skin rashes, jungle itch. We were like pack animals, carrying upwards of 60 pounds of gear, water, ammunition — and even more for the radio operators and machine gunners. I was impressed by how the men endured it all, especially the draftees who had answered the call to service.

I learned much about leadership. I was once counseled by a senior officer “not to be too worried about your men.” Incredible. I was concerned about my men’s safety at all times. Even though my company lost very few, I remember each of those deaths vividly. They were all good men, in a war very few understood.

On both of my combat tours, in 1968 at Huê´ during the Tet Offensive and in 1969-70 in the triple-canopy rainforests along the Cambodian border, we fought soldiers of the North Vietnamese army. They were good light infantry; I had respect for their determination and abilities. But they were the enemy; our job was to kill or capture them.

Though we were conducting a war of attrition, we were actually fighting the enemy’s birth rate. He was prepared and determined to keep fighting as long as he had the manpower to send south.

In terms of strategy, it seemed a war out of “Alice in Wonderland.” The Ho Chi Minh Trail, the enemy’s major supply line and infiltration route, ran through Cambodia and Laos. Yet until May 1970, both of those countries were off limits to U.S. ground forces. We bombed the trail incessantly, but the enemy’s ability to move troops and equipment south never seemed to slack. We never invaded North Vietnam. As demonstrated during Tet in ’68, the enemy could control the tempo of the war when he wished. We, on the other hand, would use unilaterally declared “truce” periods and would halt bombing to signal something never clearly defined — a willingness to talk, I imagined, which the enemy ignored.

Looking back, if our strategy was intended to force the enemy to say “enough,” resulting in a stalemate situation like that at the end of the Korean War, would the South Vietnamese have been able to defend themselves, independently? Unlikely.

Would the U.S. have been willing to commit and maintain American forces in South Vietnam indefinitely? Also unlikely.

Did we learn anything from that experience, which left such an indelible mark on our national psyche? History is a harsh teacher; there are still no easy answers.

Phil Gioia entered the Army after graduating from Virginia Military Institute in 1967. He left the military in 1977 and later was mayor in Corte Madera, Calif., and worked in venture capital and the technology industry. He lives in Marin County, Calif.

Hal Kushner

When I deployed to Vietnam in August 1967, I was a young Army doctor, married five years, with a 3-year-old daughter, just potty trained, and another child due the following April. When I returned from Vietnam in late March 1973, I saw my 5-year-old son for the first time, and my daughter was in the fifth grade. In the interim, we had landed on the moon; there was women’s lib, Nixon had gone to China; Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated.

I was the only doctor captured in the 10-year Vietnam War. I was back from the dead.

We prisoners endured unspeakable horror, brutality and deprivation, and we saw and experienced things no human should ever witness. Our mortality rate was almost 50% — higher even than at the brutal Civil War prisons at Andersonville or Elmira a century earlier. I cradled 10 dying men in my arms as they breathed their last and spoke of home and family; then we buried them in crude graves, marked with stones and bamboo, and eulogized them with words of sunshine and hope, country and family. The eulogies were for the survivors, of course; they always are.

On the Fourth of July in five successive years, we sang patriotic songs, but very softly, so our captors couldn’t hear the forbidden words, and we cried. One of us had a missal issued by the Marine Corps, our only book, but our captors had torn out the pages with the American flag and The Star-Spangled Banner .

At my release in Hanoi, I was shocked by the hair and dress of the reporters there. Once home, I saw television and movies with frank profanity and sex. When I left, Lucy and Desi slept in twin beds. I left Ozzie and Harriett and returned to Taxi Driver . What had happened to my country? Why did we suffer and sacrifice?

When my aircraft crashed on Nov. 30, 1967, I collided with one planet and returned to another. The Vietnam War, which had about one-fifth of the casualties of World War II but had lasted three times as long, had changed the country as much as the greatest cataclysm in world history. It had changed forever the way we think of our government and ourselves. The country had lost its innocence — and, for a time, its confidence.

This war, which had such a great impact on my life, is a dim memory today. There are 58,000 names on that wall, and it rates but a few pages in a high school history book.

I am dismayed by how little our young people know about Vietnam, and how misunderstood it is by others. The Vietnam War is as remote to them as the War of 1812 or the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Now, 40 years later, we must try to understand.

Hal  Kushner joined the Army and served as a flight surgeon in Vietnam. In 1967, he was captured by the Viet Cong after surviving a helicopter crash. He spent nearly six years as a prisoner of war. He lives in Daytona Beach, Fla.

Mai Elliott

Having lived through war and seen what it did to my family and to millions of Vietnamese, I feel grateful for the peace and stability I now enjoy in the United States.

In Vietnam, my family and I experienced what it was like to be caught in bombing and fighting, and what it was like to flee our home and survive as refugees.

During World War II, in my childhood, we huddled in shelters as Allied planes targeting Japanese positions bombed the town in the North where we lived.

In 1946, when French troops returned to try to take Vietnam back from Ho Chi Minh’s government, French soldiers attacking the village where we were taking refuge almost executed my father (who had earlier worked for the French colonial authorities).

In 1954, fearing reprisals from the communists about to enter Hanoi, we fled to Saigon with only the clothes on our backs.

In 1955, we fled again when we found ourselves caught in the fighting between the army of President Ngo Dinh Diem and the armed group he was trying to eliminate, leaving behind our home, which was about to burn to the ground in the onslaught.

In April 1975, American helicopters plucked my family out of Saigon at the last minute as communist rockets exploded nearby.

The fear we felt paled in comparison to the terror that Vietnamese in the countryside of South Vietnam experienced when bombs and artillery shells landed in their villages, or when American and South Vietnamese soldiers swept through their hamlets; or the terror my relatives in North Vietnam felt when American B-52s carpet bombed in December 1972. Yet, our brushes with war were terrifying enough.

As refugees, we could find shelter and support from middle-class friends and relatives, while destitute peasants had to move to squalid camps and depend on meager handouts and help from the government in Saigon. But we did find out, as they did, that losing everything was psychologically wrenching, and that surviving and rebuilding took fortitude of spirit.

Only those who have known war can truly appreciate peace. I am one of those people.

Mai Elliott was born in Vietnam and spent her childhood in Hanoi, where her father was a high-ranking official under the French colonial regime. Her family became divided when her older sister joined the Viet Minh resistance against French rule. In 1954, her family fled to Saigon, where Mai later did research on the Viet Cong insurgency for the RAND Corp. during the Vietnam War. She is married to American political scientist David Elliott. They live in Southern California.

Bill Zimmerman

I graduated from high school in 1958, thinking myself a patriot and aspiring to be a military pilot. Thirteen years later, I sat in a jail cell in Washington, D.C., after protesting what military pilots were doing in the skies over Vietnam.

My patriotism wilted in the South in 1963, after a short stint with the civil rights movement. Simultaneously, as the U.S. slid into war in Vietnam, skepticism nurtured in Mississippi led me to discover that we were stumbling into a quagmire.

The war escalated in 1965, and I became an ardent protester over the next six years. I was fired from two university teaching positions. But my sacrifices were trivial compared with those of young Americans forced into war, or Vietnamese civilians dying under bombs and napalm. With other antiwar activists, I anguished over them all, and seethed with rage at our inability to stop the killing. In our fury, we became more forceful, committing widespread civil disobedience.

That’s how I landed in jail in 1971, trying unsuccessfully to block traffic to shut down the federal government. But our failure that day became a turning point. Antiwar leaders realized that while we had finally convinced a majority of Americans to oppose the war, our militant tactics kept them from joining us.

We changed course. Large demonstrations ended. New organizations sprang up to educate the public and lobby Congress. The work was confrontational but did not ask participants to risk arrest. Millions took part. Richard Nixon escalated the war, but he also felt the heat from a much broader antiwar coalition. In January 1973, his administration signed the Paris Peace Accords, and over the next two years, our intense lobbying persuaded Congress to cut funding for the corrupt South Vietnamese government, leading to its collapse in 1975.

We learned that in matters of war and peace, presidents regularly lie to the American people. Every president from Truman to Ford lied about Vietnam. We learned that two presidents, Johnson and Nixon, cared more about their own political survival than the lives of the men under their command. Both sent thousands of Americans to die in a war they already knew could not be won.

We learned that our government committed crimes against humanity. Agent Orange and other chemicals were sprayed on millions of acres, leaving a legacy of cancer and birth defects.

Most important, Vietnam taught us to reject blind loyalty and to fight back. In doing so, we meet our obligation as citizens … and become patriots.

Bill Zimmerman is a Los Angeles political consultant and the author of Troublemaker: A Memoir from the Front Lines of the Sixties (Anchor Books, 2012).

Roger Harris

When I think about the Vietnam War, I am torn by personal emotions that range from anger and sadness to hope. The Vietnam War experience scarred me but also shaped and molded my perspective on life.

As a 19-year-old African American from the Roxbury section of Boston, I voluntarily joined the U.S. Marine Corps, willing to fight and die for my country. I had experienced the tough neighborhood turf battles too often prevalent in the inner city. I had a gladiator’s heart and no fear. My father, all of my uncles, including a grand-uncle who rode with Teddy Roosevelt, all served in the military. I believed that it was now my turn, and if I were to die, my mom would receive a $10,000 death benefit and be able to purchase a house. I saw the war in Vietnam as a win-win situation.

In Vietnam, I served with G Company, 2nd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment of the 3rd Marine Division. We were called the “Hell in a Helmet” Marines. We operated in I Corps, Quang Tri Province, mainly north of Dong Ha at the Demilitarized Zone, in hot spots called Con Thien, Gio Linh, Camp Carroll and Cam Lo. I vividly remember trembling with fear from the incoming shells in the mud-filled holes at Con Thien, wishing the shelling would stop and we could fight hand-to-hand. I remember those feelings like it was yesterday.

I, along with others, witnessed deaths unimaginable. We picked up the pieces of Marine bodies obliterated by direct hits. We stacked green body bags. I often wondered why others died and I lived.

I become angry when I think about the very young lives that were lost in Vietnam and the Gold Star families who have suffered. I am saddened by the sacrifices of true heroes and the disrespect that was shown to those who were fortunate enough to come home.

When I returned from Vietnam it was March 1968 in the midst of the civil rights movement. I landed at Boston’s Logan Airport in my Marine Corps Alpha Green uniform, with the medals and ribbons I had earned proudly displayed. I approached the sidewalk to catch a taxi, hoping that I wasn’t dreaming and would not awaken back at Camp Carroll to another bombardment.

Six taxicabs passed me by and drove off. I didn’t realize what was happening until the state trooper stepped in and told the next driver, “You have got to take this soldier.” The driver, who was white, looked up at us through the passenger side window and said, “I don’t want to go to Roxbury.”

That was my initial welcome home.

I now have an appreciation for the gift of life. Since returning home and completing college, I have devoted 42 years working in Boston schools. I see it as a tribute to my fellow Marines who paid the ultimate sacrifice.

I am very proud to have served my country as a United States Marine.

I am also very proud of the young men and women who continue to volunteer to join the armed services of our country.

Roger  Harris enlisted in the Marines and served in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. Afterward, he worked in the Boston public school system for more than 40 years. He lives in New York and Boston.

Eva Jefferson Paterson

This summer, I attended the 50th reunion of my high school class in Mascoutah, Ill., across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. My dad was a career Air Force man and was stationed at Scott Air Force Base nearby in 1960.

During dinner, before we rocked out to the Beach Boys and Stevie Wonder, a group of us talked about the war in Vietnam. The men remembered the draft system that required all young men to register to serve in the military. While I was in college at Northwestern from 1967 to 1971, a draft lottery was established. Numbers were drawn out of a big bin — similar to the one used for weekly state lotteries — corresponding to the days of the year. If your birthday corresponded to the first number drawn, your draft number was 1, and you were virtually certain to be drafted and sent to war. Most men from that period remember their number.

Some at our reunion had felt that it was their patriotic duty to serve; others were just delighted that their lottery numbers were above 300 and they were unlikely to be drafted. Few of us were anti-war at that time; I fully supported the war. My dad was sent to Cam Rahn Bay and Tan Son Nhut air force bases in Vietnam in 1966, my senior year in high school.

I remember being a freshman in college and actually saying to classmates who opposed to the war, “We have to support the war because the president says the war is good, and we must support the president.” Yikes! I changed my views as I got the facts.

Much of the fervor of the anti-war movement was fueled by the slogan “Hell no, we won’t go!” There was righteous indignation about the war, but fear was a strong motivator.

Now the burden of serving in wars falls on a very small percentage of the population, one that likely mirrors the patterns in the Vietnam era, with predominantly poor white, black and Latino men and women along with those who come from military backgrounds. It would be great to have a national discussion about this, but I fear our country is quite comfortable letting poor men and women and people of color and their families bear the burden of war.

Eva  Jefferson  Paterson grew up on air force bases and enrolled in Northwestern University in 1967, where she became student body president and politically active against the war. A civil rights attorney, she now runs the Equal Justice Society in Northern California.

U.S. general on Vietnam War: ‘This was some enemy’

Vietnam War: A timeline of U.S. entanglement

Politics & Economy

Lessons from the việt nam war (part 1).

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Lessons from the Việt Nam war ( Part 1 ,  Part 2 , Part 3 )

Lessons?  For whom?  They are different for the different parties. An American might be tempted to fix on who “lost” Vietnam – Congress, the executive, the military or the media. A South Vietnamese would surely name the U.S. pullout as a major factor in his country’s defeat and draw some obvious conclusions. As for the victorious North Vietnamese, Foreign Minister Nguyễn Cơ Thạch once gave an arrogant reply to Robert McNamara’s proposal for a lessons-learned symposium: “We won the war; why would we need to learn any lesson from it?” Yet the Communists, it can be said, lost the peace for the first decade after the war ended in 1975, because they suffered an embargo, were denied normalization with the U.S., and presided over a backward country that kept their people’s lives miserable for many years in comparison with other Southeast Asian nations.

For the Communists, too, there are lessons to be learned. Despite an autocratic regime which does not tolerate political dissent, and which abuses human rights, perhaps they have learned some lessons. According to the World Bank in 2018, for example:

“Vietnam’s development record over the past 30 years is remarkable. Economic and political reforms under Đổi Mới [an economic reform program], launched in 1986, have spurred rapid economic growth and development and transformed Vietnam from one of the world’s poorest nations to a lower middle-income country.” [i]

Despite the complexities, I will try to answer the lessons-learned question as a conscientious historian who was a member of South Vietnamese society and is now a grateful U.S. citizen, and as a person who looks back at his motherland with his best wishes for the people there, even as he criticizes certain Vietnamese government policies. I will try to take the long view of history.

I see five lessons from the Vietnam War of 1960 to 1975, so called to distinguish it from the 1945 to 1954 Indochina War.:

• First, changing national interests in the Vietnam war led to drastic changes in the war’s nature and the strategy needed to fight it successfully.
• War should end with a negotiated peace, and with a political solution that sees an end to the intransigence that is appropriate for war but not for peace.
• The people are the final arbiter on a war’s conduct. War should be referred to the people as the ultimate arbiter. War should not be between armed forces directed solely by generals and their leaders, but should be supported by the population as a whole, who should be consulted when war is declared and when peace is negotiated.
• If peace is to be enduring, war should end with reconciliation.  
• South Vietnamese and American Presidential leadership was one factor in the Vietnam War’s outcome.

Hindsight, of course, makes the war’s lessons easier to understand. But a scholar’s well-researched views on the lessons of history can still serve policy-makers well, even during urgent deliberations, because they can enable sound solutions with fewer missteps. Confucius, Sun Yu, Aristotle and others contributed by their advice to wise statecraft, just as modern European and American governments benefit from the work of think tanks and universities. Thus, the utility of the exercise we are engaged in today.  Here are my five lessons from the Vietnam War:

• The first lesson: changing national interests in the Vietnam war led to drastic changes in the war’s nature and the strategy needed to fight it successfully. In Vietnam, a civil war became uncontrollable because it became an internationalized proxy war, with outside powers intervening to suit their interests, and with the United States then abandoning the fray because its interests had changed .The saying of Lord Palmerston “nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests” has to be modified as “nations have no permanent friends and only a few permanent interests” . [ii]

Vietnam’s protracted, bloody Communist-nationalist civil war became an internationalized conflict promoted by the two big power blocs, and the two sides in the small country of Vietnam were touted as a vanguard of the Socialist Bloc and the bulwark of the Free World. Both sides depended on the big powers’ political, military and economic support. Once the United States started cooperating with China after Kissinger’s and Nixon’s trips to Beijing, the Americans had no more national security interest in devoting resources to defend South Vietnam.

So the U.S. abandoned South Vietnam. It made many concessions to North Vietnam (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, or DRV) in the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, agreeing to a “leopard skin” ceasefire in South Vietnam (the Republic of Vietnam, or RVN) that left North Vietnamese troops in place, jeopardizing the South’s survival, and aiming to

bring home American troops and prisoners of war to satisfy the American public. At the same time, the U.S. failed to replace lost South Vietnamese arms and ammunition on a one-for-one basis, as promised, or even to permit South Vietnam to use the American Aid Fund (Quỹ Đối Giá) to pay the salaries of its soldiers and police.   

When North Vietnam’s all-out invasion caused the South to collapse in 1975, Secretary of State Kissinger hid from Congress the promise of President Nixon in his letters to President Thiệu to come to the rescue of South Vietnam with B52 bombing and arms aid; thus, both Congress and President Ford talked at the end only about the evacuation of the Americans from Vietnam. U.S Ambassador Graham Martin, visiting Washington at that time, condemned the American stance. “I think all over the world, everyone has reached a conclusion very harmful to us. That is it would be better to be an ally of Communism than to have the woe of being an ally of the United States.”

The South Vietnamese leaders, of course, should have been aware long before 1975, of the impermanency of big-power support and an eventual U.S. withdrawal due to changing national interest.  The South Vietnamese leadership might have guessed that although in 1954 the U.S. wanted to replace France in South Vietnam as part of the containment policy against Communist encroachment in Asia, and although the Americans had supported the Ngô Đình Diệm regime as a “bulwark against Communism in Southeast Asia” and called President Diệm the “Churchill of Vietnam,” in later years there would likely be an American disengagement due to war weariness among the public and the surging anti-war movement. The result was President Johnson’s loss of hope and his decision not to run for re-election in 1968.  

I began around that time to express, as a scholar-professor, my worry   of the impact of decreased United States support for   relevant   South Vietnamese  officials, such as the colonels and generals who studied at the National Defense College in Sài Gòn. [iii]  

With the U.S. disengagement and drastically fewer supplies, the South Vietnamese had to face by themselves the continued civil war waged by the Vietnamese Communists, who launched their final offensive with maximum assistance in arms and transportation from China and the Soviet Union. After the resignation of President Thiệu in late April 1975, the successive South Vietnamese governments of Trần Văn Hương and Dương Văn Minh tried to negotiate a cease-fire, as if the civil war could be settled among “Vietnamese brothers,” with the encouragement and good offices of French Ambassador Merillon, trying to carry on for the fading Americans.

But the victorious North Vietnamese forced the Dương Văn Minh government to accept unconditional surrender  on April 30, 1975. The political compromise that Thiệu could have pursued with the signing of the Paris Accords in 1973 was no longer available in the face of the now-lopsided imbalance of power (Thiệu himself had previously said that South Vietnam’s military potential had decreased by 60 percent). The South Vietnamese were now aiming mainly at a short humanitarian interregnum for those who feared for their lives under the Communists to leave Vietnam, as in 1954, when

hundreds of thousands of refugees moved from the North to South  Such a cease-fire was also meant to avoid the burial of Sài Gòn under a sea of firepower (biển lửa) at the hands of Communist troops.. [iv]  

The Americans, even after abandoning South Vietnam as a result of their changing view of their national strategic interests, did not abandon their humanitarian instincts. In 1975, President Ford proposed to Congress that the U.S. fund the rescue of Vietnamese refugees from inside Vietnam or from the South China Sea, and bring them halfway around the world to the United States, welcoming them to their second homeland at a time when they might have been regarded as simply the flotsam and jetsam of the Vietnam War. For this, Vietnamese in the United States will always thank the American people.

On the issue of whether the Vietnam War was a civil war or an international war by proxy, the answer is not a simple one. It was first a civil war, beginning, from 1945 and before the French attempted to return to Indochina. Then, gradually, it was internationalized by the British, the Nationalist Chinese, the French, the Americans and finally the People’s Republic of China, all injecting into Indochina their concern for their own national interests. Finally, after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords and the withdrawal of American troops and the return of American prisoners, the war returned to its civil-war status.

After the Việt Minh under Hồ Chí Minh  seized power in August 1945, there was, early in September, some friction between the Việt Minh and the Vietnamese Nationalist forces. The latter accused the Việt Minh of being Communists; the Việt Minh in turn denounced their opponents — the Việt Nam Cách mệnh Đồng minh Hội  (VNCMĐMH, or Vietnam Revolutionary Alliance) and the Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng  (VNQDĐ, or Vietnam Nationalist Party) — as reactionaries. These Nationalist forces planned to rely on the support of China’s Kuomintang (the Nationalist Party of Chiang Kai Shek) – support they had enjoyed since their exile to China after the failed rebellion of Nguyễn Thái Học in 1930 — in their plot to overthrow the Provisional Coalition Government of Vietnam (Chính phủ Liên hiệp Lâm thời Việt Nam), formed by Hồ Chí Minh on January 1, 1946, even though they already had a few representatives inside that government.

But these Nationalist parties could not carry out their plan; they lacked unity and had no popular base inside Vietnamese society due to their years in exile. They had only the hoped-for support of the corrupt Chinese generals who were coming to disarm the Japanese. Moreover, in organizing demonstrations and countering propaganda, the Vietnamese Nationalists were less skilled than the Việt Minh, who had abundant experience in these matters since Hồ Chí Minh, with the approval of Nationalist Chinese General  Zhang Fakui, returned from China to Vietnam in 1941 (under the name of the Vietnam Revolutionary Alliance, of which the Việt Minh was a member).

Moreover, the Việt Minh had the support of Chinese Nationalist generals Lu Han and Tieu Van, whom they bribed with opium and gold collected from the people, and these

Chinese generals forced the Vietnamese Nationalists to stay, albeit reluctantly, in the Communist-dominated Provisional Coalition Government of Vietnam. The Việt Minh also had support from the Third Communist International and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime intelligence agency of the United States. The Việt Minh organized meetings, marches and exhibitions with pictures of their cadre killed by the Nationalists.

There was some restraint. A Communist party member asked Hồ Chí Minh, “Dear Uncle, why let those murderous traitors live? Please just give the order and we will liquidate all of them in one night.” Ho just smiled. ”If there was a mouse in this room, would you throw a stone at it or try to catch it? Using a stone will break precious things. To achieve great work, we must have farsightedness.”

The Nationalist-Communist friction might conceivably have stopped right there, allowing Hồ Chí Minh and the leaders of the Nationalist parties to avoid civil war. In previous times, as exiles in China, the two had shared dangers, and Nationalist leaders Nguyễn Hải Thần and Vũ Hồng Khanh had helped save the life of Hồ Chí Minh by intervening in Liuzhou, China, with the Nationalist Chinese general who detained him. After capturing power in the August 1945 Revolution, Hồ Chí Minh tried to win the cooperation of the Nationalists for the new government before the returning French sowed disunion.

Hồ embraced  Nguyễn Hải Thần of the Vietnam Revolutionary Alliance  (Việt Nam Cách Mệnh Đồng Minh Hội) and implored the Nationalist parties to cooperate with him.  The Provisional Coalition Government of Vietnam included representatives of the Nationalists, such as Vũ Hồng Khanh of the Vietnam Nationalist Party (Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng, or VNQDĐ),  Nguyễn Tường Tam of the Đại Việt (Greater Vietnam) group, and Nguyễn Hải Thần of the Vietnam Revolutionary Alliance. The government, if coupled with Hồ Chí Minh ‘s restraining his Communist cadres from assassinating the Nationalist leaders, could have avoided the civil war. [v]    

Unfortunately, later in 1946, while Hồ Chí Minh was attending the Fontainebleau Conference in France and at the same time trying to invite Nationalist intellectuals in France to come home to help Vietnam, lower-level Communist leaders back in Vietnam, such as Võ Nguyên Giáp, then Minister of Interior), ordered Việt Minh assassination squads (Bạn ám sát) to kill the Nationalists and destroy their headquarters and hinterland bases. By that time, the Nationalists no longer had the protection of the Nationalist Chinese generals. The Fontainebleau Agreements were a proposed arrangement between France and the Vietminh, made in 1946 before the outbreak of the First Indochina War.  The agreements affiliated Vietnam under the French Union. At these meetings Ho Chi Minh pushed for Vietnamese independence, but the French would not agree to this proposal.

In the North, the Nationalist leaders who were killed or made to disappear were Ly Dong A, and Khai Hung and Truong Tu Anh, who set the example of an ascetic life and who slept in a bed made out of a window, according to his assistant, Bùi Tường Huân, who was later a Sài Gòn Law School professor),   As for Vũ Hồng Khanh and  Nguyễn Hải Thần, they had to flee to China.

In the South, leaders of the Trotskyite Fourth International such as  Phan Văn Hùm,  Tạ Thu Thâu ,  Lương Đức Thiệp,  Phan Văn Chánh, and  Trần Văn Thạch were killed or made to disappear. Non-Communist leaders were also liquidated. These included  Hồ Vân Nga, Huỳnh Vân Phương,  Dương Văn, Hồ Vĩnh Ký, Henriette Bùi Quang Chiêu, and Huỳnh Phú Sổ and other Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo  notables. When the South’s National Assembly met on October 28, 1946, only 291 of the 444 representatives were present, and only 37 of the 70 representatives of the Vietnam Nationalist Party and the Vietnamese Revolutionary Alliance came, the others having been arrested. Later on, the 34 attending members also disappeared. Consequently, the Nationalist parties took an anti-Communist path. Some ran for cover (“chùm chăn”) i.e., became inactive, and, later, many adopted the Bảo Đại solution, joining the camp of the ex-Emperor.

I cite this long list of victims of the Việt Minh’s liquidation campaign to provide evidence for an objective historical evaluation of the Leninist terrorist strategy the Communists used to monopolize political power, which was the root cause of Vietnam’s civil war and involved the loss of leaders who could have contributed to the nation’s development.

This terrorist strategy was not necessary for the Việt Minh ‘s ascendancy, which could have been achieved via electoral majority — as in Hitler’s takeover of the Weimar regime or Putin’s hold on power. The terrorist strategy only damaged the Việt Minh ‘s status as the standard-bearer for Vietnam’s struggle for independence against the French. After many French provocations, it was only on December 28, 1946, that the Vietnam Resistance Government, the successor to the Provisional Coalition Government,  withdrew from Hanoi into the hinterland.)

It is also true that the Provisional Coalition Government of Vietnam could have continued with the sharing of power between Nationalists and Communists without changing a civil war into an internationalized war by proxy, if there had been no intervention in Vietnam’s political and military arenas by France, Great Britain and the Republic of China.

As for the United States, it could have aided Vietnam’s struggle for independence under the Provisional Coalition Government of Vietnam if it had intervened earlier and more properly in accordance with President Roosevelt’s desire to prevent a French return to Vietnam. Once Roosevelt had passed away and was replaced by President Truman, the U.S. ignored Hồ Chí Minh’s eight letters to U.S. Presidents and Secretaries of State requesting support against the French attempt to return to Vietnam. Truman thought the U.S. needed France in the incipient Cold War against the Soviet Union.

French forces were helped in their reoccupation of South Vietnam by the British army, which was in Indochina to disarm the Japanese. Pursuant to the Chunking Agreement of February 28, 1946, between France and the Republic of China, which provided among other things for disarming the surrendering Japanese troops in North Vietnam, France brought military units to North Vietnam. U.S. vessels brought the French expeditionary forces to Hải Phòng and Sài Gòn, that is, both to North Vietnam and to the South.

By way of background, on March 6, 1946, France and North Vietnam concluded a Preliminary Agreement in Fontainbleau, France, whereby France  recognized North Vietnam as a “free state” within the French Union with limited powers, and North Vietnam agreed “to receive the French army in friendly fashion” in relief of Chinese forces. The agreement was signed by Hồ Chí Minh representing North Vietnam, Vũ Hồng Khanh, the delegate of the North Vietnamese Council of Ministers, and Jean Sainteny, the delegate of Admiral Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, the High Commisioner of France in Indochina. [vi]  

On September 14, 1946, in Paris, France and North Vietnam issued a joint declaration and concluded a modus vivendi . The joint declaration stated that the Fontainbleau Agreement of March 6, 1946, was still in effect. The modus vivendi provided provisional solutions of urgent problems, including reciprocal recognition of “democratic rights” and property rights, and a cease-fire in Cochinchina, The joint declaration and modus vivendi were signed by Hồ Chí Minh and Minister of Overseas France Marius Moutet. [vii]   France sided with the Viet Minh in the latter’s anti-Nationalist activities.  France considered the Nationalists’ position extremist, as they had vigorously opposed the Preliminary Agreement, the Joint Declaration and the Modus Vivendi.

For their part, the Vietnamese Nationalists protested Ho’s accommodations with the French by way of Foreign Minister Nguyễn Tường Tam’s absence at the signing of  the Preliminary Agreement. They also leveled the serious charge of “traitor” against Hồ, who  had to present an explanation in Hà Nội at the Grand Opera House, where he swore, “I would rather die than sell out my country.” 

The civil-war character of the Vietnam War was revealed by, among other things, the fratricidal murders in later years, the atrocious land reform of 1953-54 in North Vietnam, and the killing of innocent people in Huế during the 1968 Tet offensive.

As for the internationalization of the Vietnam War, we must say that at the start it was not a war by proxy, because the Việt Minh government, on its own initiative, resisted the French attempt to take back Vietnam. This was a war of national liberation in which all Vietnamese patriots participated, not one in which the Soviet Union or Communist China entrusted the fighting to the Vietnamese. (Stalin, in fact, still treated Hồ Chí Minh  badly, as revealed in Kruschchev’s memoirs; and Mao’s forces were still busy fighting Kuomintang China and had not yet reached the border of Vietnam.) French President  François Mitterrand visited the unified Vietnam  in 1993.. Speaking at  Điện Biên Phủ, he regretted that France had made the mistake of returning to re-colonize Vietnam in a war the Vietnamese people considered a war of national liberation.

Later, the French commander-in chief  in Indochina, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny,  saw that the 280,000 men of the  French Far East Expeditionary Corps could not do the job by itself.  He thus allowed the Nationalist Vietnamese in the Bảo Đại camp to have a 70,000-man army, which was mobilized by the French. Before then, the French colonialists wanted to fight the war by themselves. In 1946, they brought Emperor Duy Tân from his place of exile to Paris, but his plane crashed in Africa under suspicious circumstances. Later, the French debated brushing aside Bảo Đại and using Queen Nam Phương as Regent, but finally settled on the Bảo Đại solution. 

When in 1954 the Americans replaced the French in Vietnam in support of Ngô Đình Diệm, Vietnam was engaged more fully in a civil war in which each side had its own distinct territory, government, and population. The war, however, became more internationalized and more of a war by proxy. North Vietnam took on the international mission of spreading communism with the help of the Soviet Union and China in addition to the task of struggle for national unification for the Vietnamese. Vietnamese Communist Party General Secretary Lê Duẩn said: “Our fight is the fight for the Soviet Union and China.” South Vietnam, at the same time, was called an outpost of the Free World by some Americans, who entrusted the country with a mission, but a limited one. The Vietnamese were assigned a territorial-defense role only when the war reached its most intense stage.

At the beginning, the U.S. government’s decision to engage in the war was supported broadly by the press and public opinion; thus, the Americans started as advisors, then sent U.S. Army Special Forces, and finally dispatched tactical ground combat troops who, among other things, launched ”search and destroy” operations.

At its peak in 1968, the American military presence was 536,000  men and women on the ground. About 2,700,000 American men and women served in Vietnam from 1957 to 1975 with, in addition, the Navy and the Air Force operating from the 7 th Fleet and Thailand. [viii]  

In his memoir, South Vietnam’s former ambassador to Washington, Bùi Diễm, described the way the Americans invited themselves into the War in 1965. After field observation visits, U.S. Defense Secretary McNamara and the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked Diễm to draft a “letter of invitation” requesting American troops for Vietnam, bypassing both the U.S. Congress and the American people. This American self-invitation was buried in the joint communiqué prepared by Diễm , then a minister in the Vietnamese Prime Minister’s Office, to save South Vietnam’s face. Even the then-U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam, General Maxwell Taylor, was taken by surprise. Almost all of South Vietnam’s military and civilian officials opposed the Americanization of the war, just as President Diệm in his tenure had opposed the debarkation in Vietnam of American combat troops. But the Americans came and then, finally, disengaged. Their departure began to happen when rising U.S. casualties appeared vividly on American TV screens, stoking the antiwar movement, first among the young and then more widely, and giving popularity to the idea of withdrawal from the war and the return of American prisoners.

The growing unpopularity in the United States of the war helped give traction to the strategy of Vietnamization within the Nixon administration. By that time, however, even the survival of South Vietnam as a nation-state was no longer of concern to many Americans.  The idea of entrusting the war effort to the Vietnamese, with American assistance and war-materiel support for the defense of what some called a bulwark of The Free World, was abandoned by the U.S. after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, the return of the prisoners of war, and the improved relations with China and the Soviet Union, the main powers on the other side.

A lesson: a small country entrusted with a military role by a big power, or assisted by that power, should think in advance about what to do when the big power abandons it and the small country has to sign a separate peace agreement or resort to some other strategy to defend its national interests. With this in mind, let us look back to 1956. If President Diệm had not regarded as part of his role to be an American-imposed bulwark of the Free World, but had followed a more independent path, he could have begun negotiations with North Vietnam, in accordance with the unsigned Final Declaration on Indochina of July 1954, to organize “free general elections by secret ballot” in 1956 under the supervision of the International Supervisory Commission. [ix]  If so, there might have been no Vietnam War, but instead there might have emerged a unified Vietnam wherein Communists and Nationalists had to coexist peacefully, at least relatively so, tolerating setbacks such as assassinations. That solution might be called “A tense peace is better than war,” and could have been a creative way to avoid war. More on this later.

As for the United States, one lesson from the Vietnam War is to avoid sending combat troops to fight a land war that could result in American casualties, lead to antiwar protests at home, and produce a quagmire with no respectable exit. For South Vietnam, that could have meant war-materiel support, but no deployment of ground combat units, as a U.S. contribution to the deterrence of Communist expansion. The tiger fighting for its own survival in its own territory has every incentive to fight for its self-preservation. The U.S. should think out in advance an exit strategy for any conflict in order to satisfy the American public and to counter an enemy’s protracted conflict strategy, such as that of the Chinese Communists under Mao, who talked of a “ten-thousand year war,” or the Islamists of today. This  lesson from the Vietnam War concerns the optimum strategy of entering and exiting the war, and not the war’s objective, which was to deter or limit Communist expansion in Southeast Asia. That objective was a valid one, and it succeeded to a degree. Although the domino theory – that other Southeast Asian countries would fall to communism after Vietnam fell ‒ did not happen, the American intervention  gave them time to consolidate themselves. There was also a certain psychological domino effect in the area of disrespect for American determination elsewhere in the world after 1975, and it might have contributed, for example, to the detention of American diplomats in Iran. As for the leaders in North Vietnam, they considered themselves revolutionary pioneers in Southeast Asia, became overambitious in their desire to assist other communist parties in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and elsewhere. According to archives of the Soviet Union, declassified after its dissolution, weapons from Vietnam were delivered to Africa via Cuba.

But Vietnam’s overstay in Cambodia (more than 10 years), after completing the praiseworthy mission of freeing it from the genocidal Pol Pot regime, and its failure to turn power over to the Cambodian people, led Vietnam into a quagmire and earned it China’s hostility for many years. This damaged Vietnam’s security interests and led to the border war launched by China in 1979 to, in the words of Deng Xiao Ping, “teach Vietnam a lesson.”  Vietnam’s Cambodian adventure has been called “Vietnam’s Vietnam.”

On the other hand, the U.S., as a big power, overcame its Vietnam syndrome and is still the dominant superpower. It was able to take revenge against Vietnam by isolating the country by implementing in 1975 a punishing trade embargo that lasted until 1994.. Vietnam, for its part, pushed for better relations with the U.S.

The transition from enemy to friend was made clear in many declarations, especially the 2005 observation by U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Michael Marine that, after a period of dark relations, “…it is clear now that Vietnam and the U.S. have no strategic differences,” and that “the U.S. respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Vietnam and will resist firmly all plots to sow disunion or threat at the borders of Vietnam. We have many common interests in regional and world security. Our current defense cooperation is the first step toward our common confrontation with the security challenges of the 21 st century.”

[i] *Author Tạ Văn Tài, Ph.D. in Political Science/Foreign Affairs (University of Virginia), LL.M. (Harvard Law School), former professor, Law Schools of SaigonSài Gòn, Hue and Can Tho Universities, National Institute of Administration, Vạn Hạnh Univeristy, Political Warfare College and National Defense College, Vietnam; also former lecturer and research associate, Harvard Law School.

1   “Vietnam Overview,” https://www.worldbank.org , accessed 13 August 2018.

[ii]   We have to be clear-minded in understanding “permanent interests” in the saying: it is the permanency of each state’s consistent pursuit of its interests, not the permanency of the content of those interests, which content of the interests may be changing with circumstances overtime, especially the political , economic or cultural interests, but  with the exception of the national security interest in  territorial integrity and sovereignty  which is always eternal, as it is related to self-preservation or survival. Consequently, all interstate relations will change and will not stay static for a long time, due to changing national interests. For example, the political interest in alliances may be changing overtime: just witness the impermanency in international relations in the change during the last two centuries of the alliance systems in European and American Continents. The economic interest in natural resources search or trade agreements or the cultural interest in learning from other nations may change with times. But it is impossible for any country to give up willingly its national security interest in its territorial integrity and sovereignty.

[iii] See my article “American money, Vietnamese blood,” published in the 1970 issue of the National Defense Journal ( Tập San Quốc Phòng ). There, and in my lecture at the Vietnamese National Defense College on President Nixon’s Vietnamization of the war, I predicted that when the Americans no longer had their husbands or sons fighting and risking death, they would be more stingy in providing military aid to South Vietnam, even as the Vietnamese continued to shed blood. I also opined that without the American backbone, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization would be a paper tiger. Probably the high-ranking officers at the National Defense College agreed with me, although we still hoped for better days when we together visited an American aircraft carrier and armada in the South China Sea and listened to General Ngô Quang Trưởng , commander of South Vietnam’s First Army Corps, lecturing on his troops’ efforts to obstruct the infiltration routes from North Vietnam to Central Vietnam.

[iv] This reduced objective was conveyed to me in April 1975 from Professor Bùi Trường Huân, Dương Văn Minh’s Minister of Defense and my brother-in-law.

[v]  The story was told by  Vũ Hồng Khanh in a reeducation camp after 1975 to his roommate, Colonel Bùi Thế Dũng, the author’s brother-in-law, who eventually relocated to Massachusetts after 12 years of detention. Colonel  Dũng was named Deputy Minister of Defence in the short-lived Dương Văn Minh government, and Khanh treated  Dũng as one of his sons. Khanh said that in the early 1940’s, Hồ Chí Minh, then using the name  Lý Thụy and pretending to be blind. was travelling with two young men from  Pác Bó in northern Vietnam to Liuzhou in southern China when they were arrested by the Kuomintang army.  The two young men escaped. Khanh later surmised they were  Phạm Văn Đồng and  Võ Nguyên Giáp.  A Vietnamese named  Lý Sanh then asked Khanh and  Vietnamese Nationalist Nguyễn Hải Thần to approach the Chinese Province Chief  General Zhang Fakui for help.

At first, General  Zhang said, “This Communist guy, we must cut him into two pieces,” but he later released  Lý Thụy (Hồ Chí Minh)  so he could go stay with Khanh,  Nguyễn Hải Thần and  Lý Sanh. Khanh related that  Nguyễn Hải Thần was fond of the lively  Vietnamese man, who was also trusted by General  Zhang, who gave him work assignments. When, in 1943, the Vietnamese Revolutionary Alliance discussed sending someone back to Vietnam to set up a base for the revolution,  Lý Thụy volunteered to be the man. Later, in 1945, when the Việt Minh  seized power, President Hồ Chí Minh invited  Vũ Hồng Khanh and  Nguyễn Hải Thần to join the Coalition Government. It was only then, as they all sat together for lunch on a mat in the presidential palace in Hanoi, that they recognized that Hồ Chí Minh  was the man they had known as  Lý Thụy and that  the Vietnamese Communst Hoàng Văn Hoan was  Lý Sanh .

Years later, in 1977, after  Vũ Hồng Khanh had been arrested in South Vietnam and put in a reeducation camp in the north, Minister of Security Tran Quoc Hoan visited him in the camp and ordered the release of Khanh and allowed him to live with his eldest daughter, then aged 53, who remained in North Vietnam after 1954, in their home province of Vĩnh Phúc. If, in 1945 and 1946, the Communist leaders under Hồ Chí Minh had treated the Nationalist leaders with that same respect instead of assassinating them in large numbers, the civil war might not have happened.

[vi] Bulletin Hebdomadaire Ministère de la France d’Outremer , no. 67 (March 18, 1946) translated in Harold R.Isaacs (ed.), New Cycle in Asia (1947), pp. 161-162 cited in “Agreement on the Independence of Vietnam, » www.vietnamwar50th.com , accessed August 26, 2018.

[vii]   The Ambassador in France (Jefferson Caffrey) to the Secretary of State, September 17, 1946, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, The Far East , history.state.gov, accessed August 26, 2018.

[viii] Sources:

• “Vietnam War Allied Troop Levels 1960-73,” americanwarlibrary.com , accessed August 26, 2018;
• “Vietnam: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Military Service History,” https:www.va.gov, accessed August 26, 2018.

[ix]  Indochina Documents Prepared by the International Secretariat of the Geneva Conference The Final Declaration on Indochina,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, The Geneva Conference, Volume XVI, history.state.gov, accessed August 22, 2018.

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Vietnam War

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 28, 2023 | Original: October 29, 2009

The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. More than 3 million people (including over 58,000 Americans) were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians. 

Opposition to the war in the United States bitterly divided Americans, even after President Richard Nixon signed the  Paris Peace Accords  and ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973. Communist forces ended the war by seizing control of South Vietnam in 1975, and the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam the following year.

Roots of the Vietnam War

Vietnam, a nation in Southeast Asia on the eastern edge of the Indochinese peninsula, had been under French colonial rule since the 19th century.

During World War II , Japanese forces invaded Vietnam. To fight off both Japanese occupiers and the French colonial administration, political leader Ho Chi Minh —inspired by Chinese and Soviet communism —formed the Viet Minh, or the League for the Independence of Vietnam.

Following its 1945 defeat in World War II, Japan withdrew its forces from Vietnam, leaving the French-educated Emperor Bao Dai in control. Seeing an opportunity to seize control, Ho’s Viet Minh forces immediately rose up, taking over the northern city of Hanoi and declaring a Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) with Ho as president.

Seeking to regain control of the region, France backed Emperor Bao and set up the state of Vietnam in July 1949, with the city of Saigon as its capital.

Both sides wanted the same thing: a unified Vietnam. But while Ho and his supporters wanted a nation modeled after other communist countries, Bao and many others wanted a Vietnam with close economic and cultural ties to the West.

Did you know? According to a survey by the Veterans Administration, some 500,000 of the 3 million troops who served in Vietnam suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and rates of divorce, suicide, alcoholism and drug addiction were markedly higher among veterans.

HISTORY Vault: Vietnam in HD

See the Vietnam War unfold through the gripping firsthand accounts of 13 brave men and women forever changed by their experiences.

When Did the Vietnam War Start?

The Vietnam War and active U.S. involvement in the war began in 1954, though ongoing conflict in the region had stretched back several decades.

After Ho’s communist forces took power in the north, armed conflict between northern and southern armies continued until the northern Viet Minh’s decisive victory in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. The French loss at the battle ended almost a century of French colonial rule in Indochina.

The subsequent treaty signed in July 1954 at a Geneva conference split Vietnam along the latitude known as the 17th Parallel (17 degrees north latitude), with Ho in control in the North and Bao in the South. The treaty also called for nationwide elections for reunification to be held in 1956.

In 1955, however, the strongly anti-communist politician Ngo Dinh Diem pushed Emperor Bao aside to become president of the Government of the Republic of Vietnam (GVN), often referred to during that era as South Vietnam.

The Viet Cong

With the Cold War intensifying worldwide, the United States hardened its policies against any allies of the Soviet Union , and by 1955 President Dwight D. Eisenhower had pledged his firm support to Diem and South Vietnam.

With training and equipment from American military and the CIA , Diem’s security forces cracked down on Viet Minh sympathizers in the south, whom he derisively called Viet Cong (or Vietnamese Communist), arresting some 100,000 people, many of whom were brutally tortured and executed.

By 1957, the Viet Cong and other opponents of Diem’s repressive regime began fighting back with attacks on government officials and other targets, and by 1959 they had begun engaging the South Vietnamese army in firefights.

In December 1960, Diem’s many opponents within South Vietnam—both communist and non-communist—formed the National Liberation Front (NLF) to organize resistance to the regime. Though the NLF claimed to be autonomous and that most of its members were not communists, many in Washington assumed it was a puppet of Hanoi.

Domino Theory

A team sent by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to report on conditions in South Vietnam advised a build-up of American military, economic and technical aid in order to help Diem confront the Viet Cong threat.

Working under the “ domino theory ,” which held that if one Southeast Asian country fell to communism, many other countries would follow, Kennedy increased U.S. aid, though he stopped short of committing to a large-scale military intervention.

By 1962, the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam had reached some 9,000 troops, compared with fewer than 800 during the 1950s.

Gulf of Tonkin

A coup by some of his own generals succeeded in toppling and killing Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, in November 1963, three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas .

The ensuing political instability in South Vietnam persuaded Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson , and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to further increase U.S. military and economic support.

In August of 1964, after DRV torpedo boats attacked two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, Johnson ordered the retaliatory bombing of military targets in North Vietnam. Congress soon passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution , which gave Johnson broad war-making powers, and U.S. planes began regular bombing raids, codenamed Operation Rolling Thunder , the following year.

The bombing was not limited to Vietnam; from 1964-1973, the United States covertly dropped two million tons of bombs on neighboring, neutral Laos during the CIA-led “Secret War” in Laos . The bombing campaign was meant to disrupt the flow of supplies across the Ho Chi Minh trail into Vietnam and to prevent the rise of the Pathet Lao, or Lao communist forces. The U.S. bombings made Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in the world.

In March 1965, Johnson made the decision—with solid support from the American public—to send U.S. combat forces into battle in Vietnam. By June, 82,000 combat troops were stationed in Vietnam, and military leaders were calling for 175,000 more by the end of 1965 to shore up the struggling South Vietnamese army.

Despite the concerns of some of his advisers about this escalation, and about the entire war effort amid a growing anti-war movement , Johnson authorized the immediate dispatch of 100,000 troops at the end of July 1965 and another 100,000 in 1966. In addition to the United States, South Korea , Thailand, Australia and New Zealand also committed troops to fight in South Vietnam (albeit on a much smaller scale).

William Westmoreland

In contrast to the air attacks on North Vietnam, the U.S.-South Vietnamese war effort in the south was fought primarily on the ground, largely under the command of General William Westmoreland , in coordination with the government of General Nguyen Van Thieu in Saigon.

Westmoreland pursued a policy of attrition, aiming to kill as many enemy troops as possible rather than trying to secure territory. By 1966, large areas of South Vietnam had been designated as “free-fire zones,” from which all innocent civilians were supposed to have evacuated and only enemy remained. Heavy bombing by B-52 aircraft or shelling made these zones uninhabitable, as refugees poured into camps in designated safe areas near Saigon and other cities.

Even as the enemy body count (at times exaggerated by U.S. and South Vietnamese authorities) mounted steadily, DRV and Viet Cong troops refused to stop fighting, encouraged by the fact that they could easily reoccupy lost territory with manpower and supplies delivered via the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Cambodia and Laos. Additionally, supported by aid from China and the Soviet Union, North Vietnam strengthened its air defenses.

Vietnam War Protests

By November 1967, the number of American troops in Vietnam was approaching 500,000, and U.S. casualties had reached 15,058 killed and 109,527 wounded. As the war stretched on, some soldiers came to mistrust the government’s reasons for keeping them there, as well as Washington’s repeated claims that the war was being won.

The later years of the war saw increased physical and psychological deterioration among American soldiers—both volunteers and draftees—including drug use , post-traumatic stress disorder ( PTSD ), mutinies and attacks by soldiers against officers and noncommissioned officers.

Between July 1966 and December 1973, more than 503,000 U.S. military personnel deserted, and a robust anti-war movement among American forces spawned violent protests, killings and mass incarcerations of personnel stationed in Vietnam as well as within the United States.

Bombarded by horrific images of the war on their televisions, Americans on the home front turned against the war as well: In October 1967, some 35,000 demonstrators staged a massive Vietnam War protest outside the Pentagon . Opponents of the war argued that civilians, not enemy combatants, were the primary victims and that the United States was supporting a corrupt dictatorship in Saigon.

Tet Offensive

By the end of 1967, Hanoi’s communist leadership was growing impatient as well, and sought to strike a decisive blow aimed at forcing the better-supplied United States to give up hopes of success.

On January 31, 1968, some 70,000 DRV forces under General Vo Nguyen Giap launched the Tet Offensive (named for the lunar new year), a coordinated series of fierce attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam.

Taken by surprise, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces nonetheless managed to strike back quickly, and the communists were unable to hold any of the targets for more than a day or two.

Reports of the Tet Offensive stunned the U.S. public, however, especially after news broke that Westmoreland had requested an additional 200,000 troops, despite repeated assurances that victory in the Vietnam War was imminent. With his approval ratings dropping in an election year, Johnson called a halt to bombing in much of North Vietnam (though bombings continued in the south) and promised to dedicate the rest of his term to seeking peace rather than reelection.

Johnson’s new tack, laid out in a March 1968 speech, met with a positive response from Hanoi, and peace talks between the U.S. and North Vietnam opened in Paris that May. Despite the later inclusion of the South Vietnamese and the NLF, the dialogue soon reached an impasse, and after a bitter 1968 election season marred by violence, Republican Richard M. Nixon won the presidency.

Vietnamization

Nixon sought to deflate the anti-war movement by appealing to a “silent majority” of Americans who he believed supported the war effort. In an attempt to limit the volume of American casualties, he announced a program called Vietnamization : withdrawing U.S. troops, increasing aerial and artillery bombardment and giving the South Vietnamese the training and weapons needed to effectively control the ground war.

In addition to this Vietnamization policy, Nixon continued public peace talks in Paris, adding higher-level secret talks conducted by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger beginning in the spring of 1968.

The North Vietnamese continued to insist on complete and unconditional U.S. withdrawal—plus the ouster of U.S.-backed General Nguyen Van Thieu—as conditions of peace, however, and as a result the peace talks stalled.

My Lai Massacre

The next few years would bring even more carnage, including the horrifying revelation that U.S. soldiers had mercilessly slaughtered more than 400 unarmed civilians in the village of My Lai in March 1968.

After the My Lai Massacre , anti-war protests continued to build as the conflict wore on. In 1968 and 1969, there were hundreds of protest marches and gatherings throughout the country.

On November 15, 1969, the largest anti-war demonstration in American history took place in Washington, D.C. , as over 250,000 Americans gathered peacefully, calling for withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.

The anti-war movement, which was particularly strong on college campuses, divided Americans bitterly. For some young people, the war symbolized a form of unchecked authority they had come to resent. For other Americans, opposing the government was considered unpatriotic and treasonous.

As the first U.S. troops were withdrawn, those who remained became increasingly angry and frustrated, exacerbating problems with morale and leadership. Tens of thousands of soldiers received dishonorable discharges for desertion, and about 500,000 American men from 1965-73 became “draft dodgers,” with many fleeing to Canada to evade conscription . Nixon ended draft calls in 1972, and instituted an all-volunteer army the following year.

Kent State Shooting

In 1970, a joint U.S-South Vietnamese operation invaded Cambodia, hoping to wipe out DRV supply bases there. The South Vietnamese then led their own invasion of Laos, which was pushed back by North Vietnam.

The invasion of these countries, in violation of international law, sparked a new wave of protests on college campuses across America. During one, on May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio , National Guardsmen shot and killed four students. At another protest 10 days later, two students at Jackson State University in Mississippi were killed by police.

By the end of June 1972, however, after a failed offensive into South Vietnam, Hanoi was finally willing to compromise. Kissinger and North Vietnamese representatives drafted a peace agreement by early fall, but leaders in Saigon rejected it, and in December Nixon authorized a number of bombing raids against targets in Hanoi and Haiphong. Known as the Christmas Bombings, the raids drew international condemnation.

The Pentagon Papers

A top-secret Department of Defense study of U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967 was published in the New York Times in 1971—shedding light on how the Nixon administration ramped up conflict in Vietnam. The report, leaked to the Times by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, further eroded support for keeping U.S. forces in Vietnam. 

When Did the Vietnam War End?

In January 1973, the United States and North Vietnam concluded a final peace agreement, ending open hostilities between the two nations. War between North and South Vietnam continued, however, until April 30, 1975, when DRV forces captured Saigon, renaming it Ho Chi Minh City (Ho himself died in 1969).

More than two decades of violent conflict had inflicted a devastating toll on Vietnam’s population: After years of warfare, an estimated 2 million Vietnamese were killed, while 3 million were wounded and another 12 million became refugees. Warfare had demolished the country’s infrastructure and economy, and reconstruction proceeded slowly.

In 1976, Vietnam was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, though sporadic violence continued over the next 15 years, including conflicts with neighboring China and Cambodia. Under a broad free market policy put in place in 1986, the economy began to improve, boosted by oil export revenues and an influx of foreign capital. Trade and diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the U.S. resumed in the 1990s.

In the United States, the effects of the Vietnam War would linger long after the last troops returned home in 1973. The nation spent more than $120 billion on the conflict in Vietnam from 1965-73; this massive spending led to widespread inflation, exacerbated by a worldwide oil crisis in 1973 and skyrocketing fuel prices.

Psychologically, the effects ran even deeper. The war had pierced the myth of American invincibility and had bitterly divided the nation. Many returning veterans faced negative reactions from both opponents of the war (who viewed them as having killed innocent civilians) and its supporters (who saw them as having lost the war), along with physical damage including the effects of exposure to the toxic herbicide Agent Orange , millions of gallons of which had been dumped by U.S. planes on the dense forests of Vietnam.

In 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled in Washington, D.C. On it were inscribed the names of 57,939 American men and women killed or missing in the war; later additions brought that total to 58,200.

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Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences

Reexamining the Vietnam War, four decades after America’s defeat

Arthur waldron, the lauder professor of international relations, discusses lessons from the war learned and unlearned, the failure of u.s. leadership, and the effects of the war on the vietnam generation..

This story originally appeared in the Oct. 26, 2017 edition of the Penn Current Express .

The Vietnam War ended in 1975 after 20 years of fighting and more than 55,000 Americans and between 3 and 4 million Vietnamese dead.

North Vietnamese tactics, management, and resilience were able to overcome the super-powerful tools and instruments of war of the United States, which was weakened by ineffectual leaders, poor policy and planning, and social unrest at home. The war split the country along partisan and ideological lines, a divide that still remains.

Americans of a certain age do not like to think about the long, lost war, and the reasons for the country’s defeat. The War in Vietnam remains tucked, generally, in the deepest recesses of the national consciousness, reemerging now and then like a repressed memory, brought back for cultural or historical reasons, like Ken Burns’ recent 10-part, 18-hour documentary “The Vietnam War.”

“I think we Americans are very deeply troubled by it because it exposed defects in our character, and also defects in our competence,” says Arthur Waldron , the Lauder Professor of International Relations in the Department of History in the School of Arts & Sciences . “We like to think of ourselves as always being good, and I think that in the abstract, we were on the right side, which was to stop communism. But the way that we did this was so totally incompetent that it led to just a ghastly tragedy.

“It’s quite understandable that we sort of pretend that this never happened, but it was tremendously formative,” Waldron adds. “The country that we live in today is post-Vietnam America.”

An Asia expert who was previously a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, Waldron teaches the seminar “The Vietnam War: Issues and Interpretations” and the lecture course “The Vietnam Wars: 1945-1979.” On account of new knowledge and research from a diverse group of scholars, such as the book “Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam” by Penn alumna Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Waldron says the general understanding of the war in the United States is changing.

“In 1975, everybody in America thought the same thing—and most of them haven’t looked at it since, so they still think the same thing,” he says. “But, in fact, there have been some people studying the war, so now the whole picture has changed. As a result, the whole story is going to change, and it’s being changed by facts, not by opinions.”

Penn Today sat down with Waldron at Perry World House to discuss undergraduate students’ knowledge of the Vietnam War, mistakes made by the U.S. leadership, the failures of President John F. Kennedy, and the effects of the war on the Vietnam generation.

You were a college student in 1968 and 1969, the worst years of the Vietnam War. What were your thoughts about the war when you were an undergrad?

I had a very unusual set of experiences before the Vietnam War, which enabled me to put it in an international context. When I was a teenager, I had gone to school in Europe for a year as part of an exchange program. I discovered that there was a teacher who organized groups to go to the Soviet Union, so I signed up. Starting in my senior year of high school, I traveled to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. This was at a time when they still felt confident and we still thought they were going to overtake us economically. I traveled all over Eastern Europe and communist countries, and that basically persuaded me that the information about communism coming from America was not propaganda, but, in fact, a place like East Germany really was a lousy place to live. A lot of people came to the Vietnam War knowing only America, so if you said, ‘There are communists fighting in Vietnam,’ they didn’t really know what communism was. But I had been exposed to it very thoroughly. It’s sort of like being vaccinated. So when someone told me about how great Ho Chi Minh was and how he was going to make Vietnam into a paradise for the Vietnamese people, I said, ‘I heard that before.’

Do the students in your classes come with any knowledge of the Vietnam War?

Very little. But remember how long ago it was. It ended in 1975. That’s more than 40 years ago. One of the things that I’ve discovered is that students who were born such that they’re 18 now, they don’t have any sense of the war. It’s ancient history. For me, it would be the equivalent of a war happening in 1910, so I spend a lot of time trying to set up particularly a sense of what America was like before we completely messed up and humiliated ourselves in Vietnam.

What were some of the mistakes that the United States made?

As far as I can tell, we had no good intelligence about the enemy, or even about Vietnam itself. There was no sense of urgency that before we did anything, we should really find out a lot about the country and about the combatants. We should know the names of all the North Vietnamese leaders, and have some idea of what their political views are, what kinds of internal fights they were having. Also, the failure to understand strategy transformed the nature of the war. Had the strategy been properly understood and conceived, it’s quite likely that the war could have been ended successfully in a matter of years at most. But the strategy was misconceived and we created a sink into which you could pour as many American troops as you wanted without making any difference because you weren’t hitting the enemy where it hurt.

The Vietnam War spanned five presidents, from Eisenhower, to Kennedy, to Johnson, to Nixon, to Ford. Is there one president you think deserves more blame than the others for mismanaging the war?

I would probably blame Kennedy above all, not so much for what he did, but for what he didn’t do, which was to listen carefully and think it through, really work on it like homework.

What were some of his missteps or mistakes?

If you read his inaugural address, it’s a great speech, it’s a wonderful piece of English, but it overpromises, and it reflects what I would call American arrogance—if not even hubris—the sense that we can fix everything, we can do anything. It portrays us as being more powerful and better than we really are. It makes us almost take on a mission of sort of saving the world. It conveys a degree of pride and confidence that is way out of line, that only a god could have, and so, therefore, it raised the expectations of the American people to a level which could not possibly be satisfied.

Was there a member of his administration who you think gave him bad advice?

In the Vietnam War, really the worst influence on our strategy was Averell Harriman [assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs]. He was ambassador to Russia in the [Franklin] Roosevelt administration, he was at the Yalta talks, he was governor of New York. Harriman was the one who messed up the Kennedy policy. Harriman is the person who promoted the neutralization of Laos, and he’s also the person who advocated for the murder of the President of South Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem. Harriman just hated Diem, and he worked around Dean Rusk, who was our secretary of state, to prevent Rusk from controlling policy. And as a result, Kennedy got conflicting advice, and Harriman in the end was able to arrange for the killing of Diem. The problem with that is, who takes over after Diem? Well, it is the military and generals. In this country, we’ve had many presidents who are famous for their military service, but in Asia, that’s not the way it is. In most Asian countries—this was true in the old days, it’s less true now—the army is the tool of a particular political group, so the people tend to look down on them. It was very hard for the generals to lead the state. By the end of the Kennedy administration and the assassination of Diem, it’s like a chess game where you make such disastrous moves that there’s almost no way you can win the game unless you start over. We did such stupid things that before the war was really being even fought, our strategy was so flawed that it made defeat very easy.

Did Kennedy ever reach out to Eisenhower for advice, given his success in World War II?

There was a shift in policy between Eisenhower and Kennedy. Eisenhower understood the strategy of the situation. He told Kennedy, the day before Kennedy was inaugurated, that he could go into Southeast Asia or not. It’s a choice. You don’t have to. If Vietnam goes, it’s not the end of the world for the United States, but if you do go in, Laos is the country that is the key. If the communists were able to go into Laos and just start coming into Vietnam from the west, down a thousand miles of border, there’s no way you could hold Vietnam. Eisenhower stressed that, but the Kennedy administration reversed everything that Ike had figured out. Kennedy was very foolish not to spend more time listening to Eisenhower. 

Why do you think Kennedy didn’t listen to him?

There was a very strong element of social prejudice, and there was a kind of clubbiness about the Kennedy administration, a social clubbiness that made someone like Eisenhower unwelcome. Eisenhower was born in Kansas. He went to West Point. He never went to Harvard. He never lived in the Northeast. The Bostonian Kennedy crowd looked down on Eisenhower because he was a West Point grad, because he came from Kansas, because he was not socially prominent. 

What was happening in North Vietnam in 1959, ’60, ’61?

By 1959, there had been a big party fight in Vietnam, and a man named Le Duan basically became the strongman. He was the one who was calling the shots, and Ho Chi Minh, whom everybody had heard of, was sort of sidelined. Le Duan decided they were going to invade South Vietnam because he had been down there, and he saw that the South Vietnamese were not crazy about their government. They respected it, but they didn’t like it. The South Vietnamese wanted a more democratic government, and a freer government, and they didn’t want communism at all. Le Duan and his people said the only way to invade South Vietnam is to send our soldiers because there aren’t enough South Vietnamese who are communists to put together even a little army. So by 1960, they had already decided to invade, and that they were going to build a passage through Laos called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In 1960, there was already a kind of prototype of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It got much bigger, but it was already there in 1960. So even before Kennedy made his decisions, the North Vietnamese had already shown their hand. If we would have had good intel, we would have asked, ‘Why have they built this road leading from Vietnam all the way down to the sea?’ 

Do you think Lyndon Johnson could have changed course and changed the outcome of the war after Kennedy was assassinated?

Johnson had the opportunity to remedy the mistakes, but Johnson was a very self-centered man. He could have said, ‘Look, we’ve got problems, let’s get our top 20 strategists together and figure out what we’re doing, and we’ll do it right this time.’ He didn’t do that. He just said whatever Jack Kennedy would have done is fine with me, and he just kept sending American high school students and college students by the hundreds of thousands.

What effect did the war have on people of your generation?

I think everybody who went through it was affected. Everybody who was an undergraduate or was around 18 or 20. The only comparable group I can think of are the people who are about five years or so older than me who were in the Civil Rights Movement. I know people who went to the South in the days of real, old-fashioned segregation, and the imprint of the experience on their characters was very, very deep, and it really formed the rest of their lives.

What about yourself, personally? What effect did the war have on you?

It was extremely educational, and it strengthened in me the belief that I had to get out of the American bubble, because America is big enough that you can think it’s the world, but it’s not, it’s very different than the world. I had to get out of this American bubble, I had to go somewhere that is completely different, I had to do something that’s worthwhile, but is hard work, and I had to let my brain kind of come to equilibrium because at that time I couldn’t figure out which way is up. So I went out and I studied in Taiwan, and learned Chinese. Basically, that’s the beginning of the story of how I ended up here. That was partly a reaction to the Vietnam War because the Vietnam War, among other things, was a display of American ignorance about foreign countries.

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80 Vietnam War Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for Vietnam war essay topics? Being the largest conflict in the US history, Vietnam war is definitely worth analyzing.

• 🔝 Top 10 Essay Topics
• 💡 Essay: How to Write
• 🏆 Best Essay Examples & Topic Ideas
• 💣 Most Interesting Topics
• 🔍 Research Topics & Questions

Why did the US lose the Vietnam war? Who won the war and how did that happen? There are many questions about the conflict that wait to be answered. Other options for your Vietnam war essay are to focus on the US involvement or talk about the lessons of the conflict.

Whether you are planning to write an argumentative essay, research paper, or thesis on the Vietnam war, this article will be helpful. Here we’ve collected top Vietnam war research questions, titles. Essay examples are also added to add to your inspiration.

🔝 Top 10 Vietnam War Essay Topics

• Vietnam war: the causes
• US involvement in the Vietnam war
• Vietnam war: the key participants
• The causes of the conflict in Vietnam
• Gulf of Tonkin incident and its role in the Vietnam war
• Why did the US lose the Vietnam war?
• War crimes in the cause of the conflict in Vietnam
• Vietnam war: the role of women
• Weapons and technology in the Vietnam war
• Vietnam war and its influence on popular culture

💡 Vietnam War Essay: How to Write

Chemical warfare, civilian peace protests, and an overwhelming number of casualties are all central circumstances of a Vietnamese-American 19-year conflict that garnered attention all over the world.

Reflecting all these topics in a Vietnam War essay is essential to writing an excellent paper, as well as other structural and informational points. In the prewriting stages:

• Research your issue. Doing so will not only help you choose among various Vietnam War essay topics but also help you start assembling a list of sources that can be of use. Compiling a bibliography early on will allow you to gauge how well covered your subject is and whether you can approach it from different viewpoints. Use various book and journal titles to give your work academic credibility.
• Write a Vietnam War essay outline. This action will help you distribute the weight of your ideas evenly between sub-themes. In turn, doing so will allow you to create a smooth flowing, interconnected narrative of whichever issue you choose.
• Compose a title for your paper. Vietnam War essay titles should be both reflective of their author’s stance and representative of the chosen methodological approach. Since your title is the first thing a potential reader sees, it should grab their attention in the best way.
• Read available sample essays to see which tools and techniques may work in your own paper. While plagiarism is punishable in the academic world, there are no repercussions for getting inspiration or pretending to grade an essay for yourself. Good examples may be just the thing you need to write an excellent paper yourself!

Now you are ready to begin writing. Layering your paper with the appropriate information is only one aspect of essay writing, as you should also:

• Begin your introduction by placing a Vietnam War essay hook in it. This catch can be a remarkable piece of information, a quote from a famous person, or an opposing viewpoint on the subject. Whichever you choose, placing a hook allows you to interest your readers and secure their interest for the duration of your paper.
• Use appropriate terminology. A war-related paper may call for an in-depth understanding of technology, while an ideology related one requires more event-related knowledge. Choose your words according to the specifics of your issue and use them to write a comprehensive and well-rounded essay.
• Understand the cause and effect war environment. Clearly define the links between events and make sure your audience understands all the intricacies of the issue. A timeline, written by you or found online, should help you trace these connections, creating an interflowing essay.
• Recognize the effect of seemingly background events. The recognition of a soldier’s civil rights and the rise of a movement that called for American citizens to return to their home continent is not battlefield-related but greatly impacted politics regarding the issue. Remember that there may be connections between seemingly unrelated problems, and finding them is your goal as an essayist.
• Stick to your Vietnam War essay prompt and the received instructions. Ignoring the specified word count in favor of drafting a more extensive coverage of the problem is not worth losing a grade on a suburb essay.

Always check the rubric that your instructor provided to receive good grades.

Writing an essay giving your trouble? Zero starting ideas? Head over to IvyPanda and get your essay written in no time!

🏆 Best Vietnam War Essay Examples & Topic Ideas

• Similarities and Differences Between Korean and Vietnam Wars There were also several differences such as the way of development of the conflicts where the Korean War was during three years, and the Vietnam War was the prolonged struggle, the participation of the Chinese […]
• Music as a Weapon During the Vietnam War Music to the soldiers in Vietnam acted as a tool to remind all troops of the responsibility that they had taken by being on the battlefield.
• Why Did the United States Lose the Vietnam War? The Office of the Secretary of Defense had become demoralized due to the events that had taken place; hence, it was unwilling to escalate the war further due to the decline of the army troops […]
• The Vietnam War in the “Child of Two Worlds” Therefore, in the future, he is like to live in the outside world rather than in the inside one. Therefore, Lam wants to start a new life in the US and forgets his roots, which […]
• “The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War” by Downs At the very outset, it was clear to the soldiers that the war in Indochina was not being conducted in terms of the glory myths on which they had been raised. The second part of […]
• How the Vietnam War Polarized American Society It galvanized the enemy and opponents of the war in both Vietnam and America and led many to question the ethics of the campaigns.
• Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War The Vietnam War caused unintended consequences for the civil rights movements of the 1960s as it awakened the African-Americans’ consciousness on the racism and despotism that they experienced in the United States.
• Causes and Effects of the Vietnamese War To the U.S.the war was a loss, because the reunion of South and North Vietnamese citizens marked the end of the war, hence U.S.’s undivided support for the southern region yielded nothing, apart from numerous […]
• Photos of Vietnam War The role of the media in the Vietnam War also raises issues of what the media ought to censor and report to the public.
• The Use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War The Association of American Advancement of science prompted the US government to allow investigations into the effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam in 1968.
• Protests and Music of the Vietnam War As the public absorbed the announcement, and the truth behind the war, they were angered by the fact that many American lives had been lost in the war, and the fact that the government was […]
• Vietnam War in the “Platoon” Movie by Oliver Stone In the context of the war, the confrontation between two non-commissioned officers, the cruel-hearted Barnes and the humane Elias, is depicted.
• How Did the Media Shape Americans’ Perceptions of the Vietnam War? At the heart of this war, the media is believed to have shaped the Americans perception about the war. Technology in this moment made it possible for television to film some incidents in the war […]
• Political and Social Forces During and After the Vietnam War The political forces in the aftermath of the Vietnam War centered around balancing between the Cold War and the maintenance of public support.
• Researching and Analysis of the Vietnam War A Chinese leader inspired by the Soviet Union and the Chinese, Ho Chi Minh, formed a union to aid the resistance against the French occupiers in Vietnam and the Japanese.
• The Vietnam War and the Tet Offensive In this presentation, the discussion of the impact of Tet Offensive on the United States and the role of media in military events will be discussed.
• The Artistic Legacy of Maya Lin: A Cultural Response to the Vietnam War Major confrontations as the signs of a shift in cultural perspectives and attitudes have always defined the development of art, the Vietnam War being one of the infamous examples of the phenomenon.
• Vietnam War: History and Facts of War That Began in 1959 The Second Indochina War began in 1959, five years after the division of the country, according to the Geneva Agreement. South Vietnam’s troops failed to substitute American soldiers, and in 1974 the peace agreement was […]
• The Vietnam War: Diplomatic Mechanisms Connected With the USA The onset of the Vietnam War exposed the vagaries in the American political and administrative systems in terms of issues of diplomacy, presidency, and even in cultural and social matters.
• “The Green Berets” Film About the Vietnam War According to the plot, one American journalist named George Beckworth is to cover the topic of the military involvement of the USA in this war.
• Vietnam War: David Halberstam’s “The Making of a Quagmire” In his account, the author of the book The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era, is categorical about the dealings of the Americans in the Vietnamese affair.
• “A Time of War: The United States and Vietnam” by Robert D. Schulzinger These events relate to the activities and interests of the Americans, the French and Vietnamese which preceded the beginning and the aftermath of the war.
• Interview Report: Memories of the Vietnam War Locker about the way he happened to take part in the Vietnam War, he said that he was drafted but, anyway, at that time he thought that it was his destiny as he wanted to […]

💣 Most Interesting Vietnam War Topics

• Ho Chi Minh’s Influence in the Vietnam War He was the leader of the Vietnam independence movement and established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam which was governed by the communists.
• “Vietnam War Generation Journal” by Aaron Over the years, the American people realized that the lived of the US soldiers were wasted for achieving the ambitious goals of the American leaders.
• How the Vietnam War Influenced the Iraq War? During the Vietnam era, the neo-conservatism movement expanded due to the political polarization occurring in the country between the anti-war, anti-American sentiments of the counterculture and neo-cons who championed blind patriotism.
• Impact of the Vietnam War and Results of the Cold War It galvanized the enemy and opponents of the war in both Vietnam and America and led many to question the ethics of the campaigns.
• The Vietnam War in American History Since early fifties the government of the United States began to pay special attention to Vietnam and political situation in this country, because, it was one of the most important regions in the Southeast Asia.
• How TV Showed the Vietnam War At the dawn of television media emergence, the coverage of the Vietnam War was subjective as the opinion of the public was manipulated by the government to get the desired reaction from the Americans to […]
• Vietnam War on Television Thus, the research paper will be written in accordance with the following working thesis statement: At the dawn of television media emergence, the coverage of the Vietnam War was subjective as the opinion of the […]
• Vietnam War Overview in Media Since the defeat of Saigon in April 1975, two opposing representations, the mirror theory, and the elitist opinion theory have appeared to clarify how the media impacted the results of the war.
• French Involvement in Vietnam War Even though in the overwhelming majority of cases, the author focuses attention on the history of Vietnam since the Involvement of the French troops in the nineteenth century, he also gives background information as to […]
• Vietnam War Perceptions of African American Leaders Externally, the country was embroiled in an unpopular war in Vietnam and internally, rejection of the ‘establishment’ typified by the ‘Counter-culture movement’ and the Black Civil rights movement was gaining momentum.
• Vietnamese Culture and Traditions: The Role in Vietnam War It was this division that left America with little understanding of how the rest of the world lives and how the country can effectively help others even in times of war.
• My Lai Massacre During Vietnam War American soldiers of Company assaulted the hamlet of My Lai part of the village of Son My in Quang Ngai province of South Vietnam on 16 March 1968.
• American Government’s Involvement in the Vietnam War According to John Kerry, although the main idea behind the decision made by the U.S.government at the time seemed legitimate given the rise in the threat of communism taking over democracy, the execution of it […]
• American History During the Vietnam War In the quest to figure out the events that took place in the history of America, I had an opportunity to interview a close family friend who was one of the African American soldiers during […]
• The Vietnam War on the Network Nightly News This evidence refuting the use of attrition by the American troops indicate that the strategy was ineffective and as such, it gave their enemies a leeway to capitalize on it and intensify the combat.
• China-Vietnam Opposition or the Third Vietnam War The Korean War, numerous military operations in the Middle East, and the Vietnam War were preconditioned by the clash of ideologies and parties unwillingness to make a compromise.
• Vietnam War vs. War on Terror in the Middle East The starting point for the War on Terror is considered to be the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and other locations which led to the deaths of thousands.
• The Vietnam War and Its Effects on the Veterans Although numerous books and articles contain memories of those who lived to tell the tale, the best way to learn about the Vietnam War and to understand how war changes people is to talk to […]
• Vietnam War: The Results of Flawed Containment The neo-orthodox perspective on the war in Vietnam consisted of criticism towards United States policies in the sense that civilian and military leaders of the country were unsuccessful in developing achievable and realistic plans with […]
• Vietnam War and American Revolution Comparison Consequently, the presence of these matters explains the linkage of the United States’ war in Vietnam and the American Revolution to Mao’s stages of the insurgency.
• Vietnam War in “A Path to Shine After” by James Post The author uses the contrast between a peaceful life of the veteran and his experience as a soldier to highlight the senselessness and cruelty of war.
• Vietnam War Experiences in David Vancil’s Poems For these reasons, the majority of the works devoted to the given issue tend to demonstrate the horrors of war and factors that impacted people.
• America in Vietnam War: Effects of Involvement However, the involvement of America in the war has made other countries around the world to question its principle of morality.

🔍 Vietnam War Research Topics & Questions

• African American Soldiers During Vietnam War In the 1960s and 70s, African Americans battled racial discrimination at home in the United States but also faced similar if not the same tension as a member of the Armed Forces while fighting in […]
• Contribution of Women in the Vietnam War Special emphasis will be given to nurses because without their contribution, so many soldiers would have lost their lives or suffered from deteriorating conditions in the War Some of the nurses in the Vietnam War […]
• The American Strategic Culture in Vietnam War Spector further emphasizes that the involvement of the United States in both phases of the Vietnam War was due to Harry Truman, the then president of the United States, who did not support communism, but […]
• Hanoi and Washington: The Vietnam War The Vietnam War was a conflict that was military in nature, occurred between the years 1954 and 1975, and was between the communists and the non-communists.
• America’s Failure in Promoting Its Politic in Vietnam Existing literature purports that, part of America’s agenda in Vietnam was to stop the spread of communism and in other literature excerpts, it is reported that, America was persuading North Vietnam to stop supporting the […]
• Vietnam War in the Book “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien The Irony of being at war is that Peace and conflict are both inevitable; it is the way we handle either of the two that determines our opinion of life in general both in the […]
• Anti-War Movement and American Views on the Vietnam War The fact that people started to take part in demonstrations and openly protest any drafting and involvement of the United States in the war, created even more attention towards the Vietnam Conflict.
• The Vietnam War: Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy Leadership Roles On November 1, 1995, Eisenhower’s action to give military training to the government of South Vietnam marked the official start of the U.S.involvement in the Vietnamese conflict.
• The Vietnam War Causes The aftermath of the Second World War had the South Vietnam controlled by the French and the North Vietnam controlled by Viet Minh.
• The Vietnam War: A Clash of Viewpoints With the help of the most realistic descriptions and the vivid pictures of woes that soldiers had to take in the course of the battles, the author makes the people sink into the mind of […]
• China’s Support for North Vietnam in the Vietnam War As of the time of the war, the capital city of South Vietnam was Saigon while that of the North was Hanoi.
• The Role of Women in the Vietnam War For example, women in the Navy Nurse Corps and Army Nurse Corp were sent to take part in the Vietnam War and the Korean War.
• Appy, C. and Bloom, A., Vietnam War Mythology and the Rise of Public Cynicism, 49-73 The first myth is that the intervention of the US in the Vietnam War was devoid of any political interests and colonial based ambition contrary to that of the French.
• Vietnam Women Soldiers in the Vietnam War and Life Change After the War In 1968, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong forces attacked all the major cities of South Vietnam and even the US embassy followed where the war could not stop but in the year 1973 […]
• Vietnam War: The Battle Where There Could Be No Winners Inflamed by the ideas of the patriotic behavior and the mission of protecting the interests of the native land, the American soldiers were eager to start the battle.
• The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 Is a Turning Point in Vietnam War The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that occurred in August 7, 1964, was one of the major turning points in the United States military involvement into the flow of the Vietnam War.
• The Vietnam War’s and Student’s Unrest Connection An example of such protests were held by the by the University of Washington during the national strikes that took an approximate one week as a reaction to the Kent University shootings and a culmination […]
• Vietnam War: John Kerry’s Role Kerry’s actions during the Vietnam war that eventually led to his acquisition of the Purple Heart is a as a result of his ability to stop the actions of the enemy as evident in their […]
• Views on Vietnamese War in the Revisionism School Though United States did not involve itself into the war in order to break the dominance of Soviet Union, it wanted to gain politically and economically.
• Stories From the Vietnam War In the dissonance of opinions on the Vietnam War, it appears reasonable to turn to the first-hand experiences of the veterans and to draw real-life information from their stories.
• Concepts of the Vietnam War The fear to go to Vietnam and participate in a war that many believed America will inevitably lose, continued to engulf their life even more.
• Analysis of the Vietnam War Timeline 1961-64 In essence, the analysis of JWPs in this war would entail critical exploration of the jus in bello, with the aim of determining the combatants and non-combatants, and this is important in the sense that […]
• Politics in the 1960s: Vietnam War, Bay of Pigs Invasion, Berlin Wall However, in recent years following the collapse of the Soviet Union between1980 1990 and the opening of Vietnam to the outside world in the same period it is possible to understand the motives of both […]
• The Vietnam War Outcomes The Vietnam War was and is still considered the longest deployment of the U. In conclusion, both the U.S.and the Vietnam governments have a lot to ponder regarding the outcome of the Vietnam War.
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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The Vietnam War: Lessons Unlearned

by David Cortright | May 18, 2015 | Vietnam War , War

David Cortright

David Cortright is Associate Director for Programs and Policy Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. As an enlisted soldier during the Vietnam War, he spoke out against that conflict.

There are many lessons of Vietnam, but three stand out in explaining why the United States lost the war—ignorance, arrogance, and the absence of a viable local ally. All three continue to characterize American policy today and help to explain why wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also have failed to achieve success.

MISGUIDED INTERVENTIONS

The United States entered Vietnam without an understanding of the country’s history and culture. We did not speak the language or know the people. We viewed Vietnam through the lens of a Cold War struggle against communism rather than as a national independence struggle against colonialism and foreign domination. We did not realize the extent of the social revolution in Vietnam led by the National Liberation Front (NLF), which gave land to the tillers and solidified support for the liberation struggle. We did not understand that the war was lost politically before it ever began militarily.

U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were equally ill-informed. We entered without the ability to speak Arabic, Pashto or other local languages and had little or no understanding of tribal and ethnic dynamics. We were unprepared for the armed resistance and terrorist insurgencies that arose against us and the regimes we created. We did not realize in Iraq that removing Saddam Hussein would benefit Iran and Shia militias, or that a war against the Taliban in Afghanistan would intensify violence and instability in Pakistan.

Closely allied with ignorance is arrogance, the tendency to exaggerate our own power and underestimate that of our foes. In Vietnam we believed that American military superiority would guarantee success, that military firepower and technology could overpower our adversaries and force them to capitulate. We did not realize that an overreliance on military means can create new enemies and strengthen the very forces we seek to overcome. We watched helplessly as Saigon’s repression and our own military attacks drove people into the arms of the NLF. We miscalculated the strength of the resistance forces and their tenacity and determination to fight despite heavy losses.

Today we continue to believe in the myth of American exceptionalism, assuming that military superiority gives us the right to act as the world’s policeman. We do not understand the limits of military power or realize the negative consequences of our interventions. We believe as before that our advanced technology, now including drones, can defeat our enemies. During the Cold War we viewed local conflicts as part of a global struggle against communism. Today we misjudge diverse crises from Libya to Yemen through the singular lens of countering global terrorism. We are engaged militarily in a growing number of countries, yet insurgent forces remain strong, and we face a new and even greater threat now with the emergence of ISIS.

LOCAL GOVERNANCE MISSING

The third factor that has undermined American policy from Vietnam to the present is the absence of credible political partners. Without a local governance system that can win the trust and loyalty of local populations, external military intervention cannot succeed. Accountable governments capable of delivering public goods are essential for generating political stability, economic opportunity and peace. These have been missing in American interventions from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

The Saigon regime was largely a foreign creation and depended almost entirely on external assistance for its political, economic and military survival. The Diem regime that emerged with American support after the Geneva accords lacked political legitimacy and had little support outside the Catholic community, which was less than 10 percent of the population. Diem’s repression and corruption led to his assassination in the CIA-backed coup of 1963, followed by years of revolving door military dictatorships and then the autocratic Thieu regime. Despite massive levels of American economic and military sustenance, Thieu’s government never attracted substantial political support. The American-created Saigon army looked impressive on paper when U.S. American troops left, but it collapsed rapidly in the face of the final assault from Hanoi’s forces in 1975.

Similar problems have plagued American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Kabul regime is rated among the world’s most corrupt and has been unable to command much popular support or gain control over the country’s restive regions. It could not function without massive external financial and political support. In Baghdad sectarian violence has been rampant, and Shia militias have suppressed Sunni communities, prompting some to turn to ISIS for protection. The American-created Iraqi army has proved largely powerless against ISIS. It has been relatively easy for the United States to overthrow dictatorships but exceedingly difficult to replace them with legitimate governments.

The lessons of Vietnam remain as relevant now as they were decades ago. Military intervention is more often the problem than the solution in American foreign policy.

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War Books: The Lessons of Vietnam

Bob Baker | 08.18.23

Editor’s note: Welcome to another installment of our weekly War Books series! The premise is simple and straightforward. We ask an expert on a particular topic to recommend five books on that topic and tell us what sets each one apart. War Books is a resource for MWI readers who want to learn more about important subjects related to modern war and are looking for books to add to their reading lists.

Fifty years ago this week , an American A-7 Corsair returned to its base in Thailand after bombing a target in Cambodia. It came five months after the departure of US ground troops from Vietnam and was the last direct US military involvement in Indochina. Decades later, the US military would come to regret forgetting many lessons from its years of combat experience during the Vietnam War. Forgotten though those lessons may have been, they are not lost forever. For this installment of War Books, we asked Bob Baker, a Vietnam veteran and author of the book Break in the Chain—Intelligence Ignored: Military Intelligence in Vietnam and Why the Easter Offensive Should Have Turned Out Differently to describe five books that are among those he recommends to readers who want to better understand the US war in Vietnam, its successes, and its failures.

The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam , by Geoffrey Shaw (2015)

To understand how and why President Diem was removed by a coterie of anti-Diem Americans in the State Department, aided and abetted by several influential members of the Saigon press corps, one must read this book. It tells the sad tale of what turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes the Americans made during the war.

Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA’s Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viet Cong , by Mark Moyar (1997)

There are very few good books that tell the true story of the Phoenix Program, but Mark Moyar’s is the best of this very small lot. The Phoenix Program is one of the most misunderstood programs of the Vietnam War, due largely to the propaganda war waged against it by pro-Hanoi supporters in the West and the fact that it was veiled in secrecy (without justification in my opinion). After the war, the communists admitted that the program was highly successful.

Killer Kane: A Marine Long-Range Recon Team Leader in Vietnam, 1967–1968 , by Andrew R. Finlayson (2013)

This is clearly the best book about Marine long-range recon teams in Vietnam—it is also so well written and detailed that it should be required reading by teams and patrols in Marine and Army reconnaissance units today. It also reads almost like a how-to book in such things as what to take on a reconnaissance patrol and why, things to do and not do, and more. Finlayson doesn’t hesitate to introduce his team and how valuable each was in completing every mission, nor does he refrain from pointing out the errors he made.

Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954–1975 , translated by Merle L. Pribbenow (2002)

The unvarnished view of the war from the North Vietnamese perspective. Sketchy figures on casualties, but highly accurate information on how they viewed their strategy, operational techniques, training, organization, as well as the weaknesses and strengths of the US and ARVN forces. It also clearly points out the importance of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in determining North Vietnam’s ultimate success.

Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam , by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen (2012)

This book tells of the political infighting in North Vietnam that went on during the Vietnam War using North Vietnamese sources. If there were any doubts about who launched the Vietnam War, this book, based on archival access and interviews with key North Vietnamese players, should put those doubts to rest.

Bob Baker was the sole intelligence analyst assigned to the only intelligence unit still active in I Corps/First Regional Assistance Command at the onset of the Easter Offensive of 1972 in Vietnam, which his book Break in the Chain—Intelligence Ignored describes. He has written numerous articles for Small Wars Journal , the Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin , the American Intelligence Journal , The Drop , The INTSUM , and The Forge .

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

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Home — Essay Samples — War — Vietnam War — The Vietnam War Historical Analysis

The Vietnam War Historical Analysis

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Words: 502 |

Published: Jan 30, 2024

Words: 502 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

Historical context, causes of the vietnam war, progression of the war, opposition to the war, impact of the war.

• BBC News. "Vietnam War: History." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16220030
• National Archives. "The Vietnam War and American Involvement." https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war
• History. "Vietnam War." https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-history

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Rethinking What We Know About the Vietnam War

Teaching Activity. Zinn Education Project. 21 pages. Two lessons to introduce key facts about the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers, documents that provide essential history that is often ignored by textbooks.

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Lesson 1: What Do We Know About the Vietnam War? Forming Essential Questions

The Vietnam War seems murky for many students. Not only are students unclear about basic facts — How long was the U.S. in Vietnam? Who was the enemy? Who won? — young people also report that they are unclear about the very nature of the conflict. Was Vietnam actually a war? Was it a civil war? Was it at all similar to the wars of today? In order to provide students with a clear context for understanding the actions of Daniel Ellsberg and the role of the Pentagon Papers, we need to address students’ confusion. Teachers can enhance students’ historical understanding by providing an opportunity for them to clarify what they think they know, what they’ve heard (what seems to exist in popular culture), and by identifying essential questions to direct further learning.

Lesson 2: Rethinking the Teaching of the Vietnam War

In The Most Dangerous Man in America , Daniel Ellsberg describes when, in 1969, he first read the earliest parts of what came to be called the Pentagon Papers:

Seeing the war from its beginning affected me more than I thought possible. It changed my whole sense of the legitimacy of the war. What I learned was that it was an American war from the start. President Truman financed the French to retake its former colony even though he knew the French were fighting a national movement that had the support of the people.

Despite the fact that the Pentagon Papers was released to the world in 1971, today’s high school textbooks continue to ignore this early — and essential — history of the Vietnam War. Sadly, when it comes to probing the root causes of the Vietnam War, not a single major U.S. history textbook glances back beyond the 1950s. Why was the United States involved in Vietnam? As James Loewen points out in Lies My Teacher Told Me , his critique of 12 best-selling high school history texts: “Most textbooks simply dodge the issue. Here is a representative analysis, from American Adventures: ‘Later in the 1950s, war broke out in South Vietnam. This time the United States gave aid to the South Vietnamese government.’ ‘War broke out’ — what could be simpler!”

These lessons are excerpted from Teaching the Vietnam War: Beyond the Headlines .

Related Resources

Teaching the Vietnam War: Beyond the Headlines

Teaching Activity. By the Zinn Education Project. 100 pages. Eight lessons about the Vietnam War, Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers, and whistleblowing.

Camouflaging the Vietnam War: How Textbooks Continue to Keep the Pentagon Papers a Secret

Article. By Bill Bigelow. 2013. If We Knew Our History Series. While new U.S. history textbooks mention the Pentagon Papers, none grapples with the actual import of the Pentagon Papers.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

Film. By Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith. 2009. 94 minutes. The riveting story of how a Pentagon official risks life in prison by leaking 7,000 pages of a top secret report to the New York Times to help stop the Vietnam War.

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Histories and "Lessons" of the Vietnam War

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In diplomatic and historical contexts, appeasement refers to the foreign policy of Britain and France toward Nazi Germany during the late 1930s, which culminated in the Munich Pact (September 30, 1938), and is understood as making political or material concessions to avoid war by satisfying the demands brandished by an aggressive Adolf Hitler. This entry will first examine the roots and rise of appeasement and will then go on to detail the political, diplomatic, and scholarly reactions to the policy and its influence on foreign policy decisions up to the present.

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Appeasement was a foreign policy of pacifying an aggrieved country through negotiation in order to prevent war. The prime example is Britain’s policy toward Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the 1930s. British Prime Minister, N. Chamberlain sought to accommodate Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and took no action when Germany absorbed Austria in 1938. When Hitler prepared to annex ethnically German portions of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain negotiated the notorious Munich Agreement, which permitted German annexation of the Sudetenland, in western Czechoslovakia. The idea behind appeasement was Christian pacifism - peaceful rather than violent or belligerent relations should govern human intercourse; arbitration, surrender, or migration should be used to resolve disputes. Pacifism became widespread as a reaction to the scale of killing in the WW I and the use of universal male conscription, and gained further support after the creation of nuclear weapons. However, the Holocaust, and other industrial scale abuses of human rights, caused many to think that there could be cases when war was the least-bad course of action. Appeasement was a huge mistake on the part of the Allied nations. It is what caused WWII to occur on an even larger scale than WWI as it allowed Nazis to gain an enormous amount of power and time, posing a threat to all of Europe. Appeasement emboldened Hitler’s aggression as he gained increased confidence after annexing each new piece of land without any intervention by the League of Nations. Appeasement led to WWII. As Hitler continued to invade territories and build a military capable of fighting a major war—despite the Treaty of Versailles—Britain and France allowed him to continue, hoping he would leave them alone if they left him alone. As Sikorski (2008: 14) noted, ''In Western Europe, our friends like to say that they went to war for Poland in 1939. What actually happened was that Britain and France declared war, but then did not lift a finger to help us.'' Although allied help came late, appeasement, provided the Allies with more time to prepare for war. The idea that the Munich Agreement had restored peace fooled the Allies into a stagnant state since none of them were fully prepared for the war when it arrived. Some people saw Communism as the biggest threat to European stability. They thought that Germany could act as a buffer, especially as Hitler was very anti-Communist, besides Britain was not ready for war. In reality, the policy of appeasement is what allowed Hitler to successfully transfer troops to the Rhineland in 1936 which led to further military actions (eg the annexation of Austria). Hitler later said that the march into the Rhineland was one of the most stressful periods of his life since he knew that if the French opposed them they were not strong enough to put up a decent resistance and would have to withdraw. If the Allied nations had intervened collectively at this point in time, then perhaps Germany’s increasing military aggression could have been suppressed and WWII could have been averted (or at least reduced in size). But the policy of appeasement gave Hitler what he wanted and nurtured Germany's confidence in Hitler’s plans of European domination. The annexation of new lands by Germany contributed to the increase in German strength. For example, the Rhineland provided Germany with stronger defence of its borders and Austria provided Germany with gold, weapons, soldiers, and deposits of iron ore (which resulted in the increased production of munitions). All of these things that increased Germany’s strength and contributed to the enormous scale of destruction in WWII when the direct clash happened. Appeasement was a mistake as it provided the public and politicians with the misconception that peace was restored and war averted when Germany’s demands were met. This prevented people from realizing Hitler’s true goals (world domination — as stated in 'Mein Kampf') and taking action to stop him earlier on. The Allied leaders had simply been tricked into a passive state by Hitler. Appeasement was a mistake since it allowed Germany to make agreements with other countries (which Germany was not allowed to do according to the Treaty of Versailles), increasing German confidence in its military dominance. For example, nothing was done in 1936 when the Rome-Berlin Axis formalized the alliance between Italy and Germany. Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. This occurred because Russia observed that the allies had not stood up to Hitler when he had invaded Czechoslovakia, he thought that the allies would adopt the same nonchalance if Hitler attacked Russia. So, the Nazi-Soviet Pact was made. This pact (in which Russia and Germany secretly agreed to divide Poland between them) permitted Germany to invade Poland, effectively starting WWII. It also increased Germany’s influence in Europe to the east and temporarily removed a major power from the Allied side. All of this contributed to the enlarged scale of destruction and death during WWII. Appeasement was a mistake since it failed to achieve its one goal, keep the peace. Chamberlain, felt it was his duty to ''strain every nerve to avoid a repetition of the WWI.'' Even if the Allied leaders themselves had decided earlier on that military action was necessary, it is quite likely that they would not have had enough volunteers to sustain a proper military campaign. The citizens of Allied nations mainly supported the policy of appeasement and were not willing to go to war over small, new, foreign lands that they had never heard of before in their lives. At that time, many people did not see Hitler as a threat and very few outside of Germany knew what he was really planning (although he had outlined many of his ideas in 'Mein Kampf'). Many politicians thought that if Germany could regain its national pride and the territories it had lost after WWI then perhaps a war could be avoided. Perhaps it would have been possible to influence the public opinion through propaganda in order to garner support for stopping Hitler. Then maybe the Allies could have set up an armed force large enough to stop Hitler in the Rhineland (since his forces were weak there). However, the Allied leaders themselves had little idea of Hitler’s true intentions, so they likely had similar opinions to the public at the time and did not wish to engage in armed conflict. The Allies had decreased their armies after the end of WWI while Germany had started doing just the opposite once Hitler came to power. The Allies needed more time. Lastly, many people believed that Nazi Germany was a necessary asset in holding back the communists from Europe and the rest of the world. Appeasement was quite popular, people did not yet understand the magnitude of Hitler’s plans for all of Europe, they feared the start of another world war. Appeasement seemed a pragmatic option that will keep the peace. People naively believed in Hitler's promises underestimating military expansionism. Instead, allied leaders should have put in place an immediate threat of crippling economic sanctions, a robust force posture and an assertive strategy. Above all, the Allies should have prepared a united front and a response - when attack occurs on one country others are ready to stand up in collective self-defence to quickly disarm an aggressor. The absence of a firm Western response only encouraged Nazis to act aggressively without impunity. When dealing with an opportunistic aggressor that will continue to make demands, including the seizure of territory, as long as the costs and risk of doing so are manageable, coercive strategies work better than reassurance/appeasement ones. Martin Wight (1978: 137, 143) was right, “War is inevitable, but particular wars can be avoided.'' Appeasement could have been avoided, instead it dictated when and how WW II started and it likely influenced both the length and magnitude of the war (considering how long it took for the Allies to get involved, had there been an earlier action much of human suffering would have been prevented). The lesson on how to prevent small wars turning into world wars - appeasement of any kind, notably concessions to dictators, only fed their appetites. Appeasement caused tensions to build up for far too long, thus resulting in a war that affected much of the globe. It impacted much of the 20th Century through the foreign relations that it created. Tense Russian-American relations originated from the decision to appease Hitler. Appeasement was simply the dire circumstances of the war that eventually threw them together. After the end of the war, these tensions increased, resulting in the Cold War and the deadly nuclear arms race that threatened world peace once again. It is important to understand the meaning of appeasement and its implications to properly assess and act on future world conflicts.

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LESSON PLAN

The vietnam war.

Pairing a Primary & Secondary Source

Read the Article

Fifty years ago, the U.S. ended direct military involvement in a war that tore the nation apart and fueled distrust in government.

Before reading.

1. Set Focus Pose these essential questions: Why do countries go to war? How do wars affect countries?

2. List Vocabulary Share some of the challenging vocabulary words in the article (see below) . Encourage students to use context to infer meanings as they read.

• protracted (p. 18)
• ideologies (p. 18)
• disillusioned (p. 19)
• conscripted (p. 20)
• stalemate (p. 20)
• reconciliation (p. 21)

3. Engage Have students examine the map on page 18. Ask: What did the demilitarized zone divide? Why do you think Vietnam divided into North and South Vietnam? Why do you think the two Vietnams reunified? Why do you think what used to be called Saigon is now called Ho Chi Minh City? Explain that the article answers these questions.

Analyze the Article

4. Read and Discuss Ask students to read the Upfront article about the Vietnam War. Review why the article is a secondary source. (It was written by someone who didn’t personally experience or witness the events.) Then pose these critical-thinking questions and ask students to cite text evidence when answering them:

• Which central ideas does the author introduce in the first section? Which of these ideas is developed in the first few paragraphs of the next section, “Fighting Communism”? (In the first section, the author introduces the ideas that the U.S. had been involved in Vietnam for nearly 20 years, that the involvement had turned into a war, that both North Vietnam and the U.S. were looking to end the war, and that the war had become very unpopular with Americans. The next section explains how U.S. involvement in Vietnam began.)
• What is the connection between the Cold War and the Vietnam War? (The Cold War was a conflict between the democracies of the West and the Communist nations led by the Soviet Union to spread their ideologies. President Dwight D. Eisenhower feared that if South Vietnam fell to Communist North Vietnam, then there would be a domino effect of Communist regimes taking control of the Asian continent. So he sent U.S. advisory troops to support South Vietnamese soldiers. Later presidents increased involvement.)
• What does the section header “The War at Home” indicate the section will be about? What caused the war at home? What effects did it have? (The section header indicates that the section will discuss some sort of conflict back in the U.S. related to the Vietnam War. The conflict was that more and more people were becoming critical of the war. Effects include protests against the war and a youth movement.)
• The last section explains that in Vietnam, the conflict is called the American War. Why do you think this is? (Responses will vary, but students should support their ideas with evidence, such as the text details about millions of U.S. soldiers being sent to fight in Vietnam, the anger Le Duc Tho expressed at the Paris Peace Accords, and North Vietnamese forces quickly overrunning the South after the cease-fire.)

5. Use the Primary Sources Use the Primary Source: Project, distribute, or assign in Google Classroom the PDF A Vietnam Veteran Remembers , which features excerpts from a personal essay published in 2017 by Phil Gioia about his experiences fighting in Vietnam. Discuss what makes the essay a primary source. (It provides firsthand evidence concerning the topic.) Have students read the excerpts and answer the questions below (which appear on the PDF without answers).

• How would you describe the tone and purpose of these excerpts from Gioia’s personal essay? (The tone can be described as reflective and straightforward as well as critical in certain parts. The purpose is to describe what it was like to fight during the Vietnam War and to provide a perspective on the effectiveness of U.S. efforts in Vietnam.)
• In the first paragraph, Gioia says “Very lofty.” What does he mean? What was the reality he encountered? (By “very lofty,” Gioia means that the goal of preventing South Vietnam from falling to Communism was noble but difficult to achieve. The reality he encountered was that most soldiers were fighting to simply survive and return home.)
• What is Gioia’s assessment of the North Vietnamese army? Which details help show why he thinks this? (Gioia saw the North Vietnamese army as the enemy because that was his job, but he also respected their skill and determination. His descriptions of them as being “good light infantry” and having an ability to “control the tempo of the war” shows that he recognized their skill. His commentary that their “ability to move troops and equipment south never seemed to slack” and that they ignored truce periods to strategic advantage shows he viewed them as determined.)
• What ideas does Gioia convey through the three questions he asks and answers at the end of his essay? (Through his three questions and responses, Gioia conveys the idea that it was very unlikely that the U.S. would have succeeded—no matter what it tried—in preventing South Vietnam from being defeated by North Vietnam and falling to Communism. He also conveys the idea that the war was so complex that even today it’s hard to recognize what lessons we should have learned from it.) 
• Based on the Upfront article and the excerpts from Gioia’s personal essay, why do you think there were so many student protests against the war in the late 1960s and early 1970s? (Students’ responses will vary but should be supported by evidence from both texts.)

Extend & Assess

6. Writing Prompt Read “Escape From Cuba” in the previous issue of Upfront . Based on that article and this one, why do you think one embargo on a Communist country was lifted but not the other one? Explain in a brief essay. 

7. Quiz Use the quiz to assess comprehension.

8. Classroom Debate Should the U.S. reinstate the military draft?

9. Speaking With Meaning Display a photo of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Ask: Why do you think the design for the memorial was originally criticized? Then have students research the memorial and Maya Lin’s vision for it. Bring the class together to discuss why today the memorial is seen as a powerful tribute to those who died in the war.

Download a PDF of this Lesson Plan

Social Change Interviews

Lessons from the vietnam war: how to not treat veterans.

Posted By: curlesmt March 24, 2024

Interview with Chester Alvis, History 150 Spring 2024, Conducted by Mason Curles, March 13, 2024.

Chester Alvis was born in 1946 following the end of WWII. He was raised in Mechanicsville, VA, by a poor family consisting of his older sister and brothers–as well as his mother and father. His father enlisted and served in WWII in the army. After high school, Chester, who had not wanted to join the military, was drafted anyway. He  joined the Coast Guard with thoughts that he would not be sent to Vietnam. He was sent there, however. He did not support the war, but he felt a need to serve and fight for his country.  He was sent to basic training at Fort Carson in Colorado and trained as a nautical engineer until he was sent to Vietnam in 1965. He deployed on a naval vessel as a mechanic. He was then deployed until 1968 when he returned home to Mechanicville, VA. Following the events of his return in the coming year he married his first wife, where they travelled the world and lived happily until she died of illness at the age of 53. Following this he met Jean Curles and married Jean Alvis. They lived in Quinton VA until they built a house with their child Aaron Curles, in Chesapeake, VA, where the currently reside and live together happily with Aaron and there 2 grandchildren Mason and Landon.

The Vietnam War draft process, a pivotal element of the era, was a complex system that significantly impacted American society. The Selective Service System orchestrated the draft, which was based on a lottery system where birth dates determined the order of conscription. Men aged 18 to 26 were eligible, and those with lower draft numbers were called to service first. This system aimed to be more equitable than previous methods, which were criticized for favoring certain socioeconomic classes. The draft not only supplied the military with troops but also fueled the antiwar movement, as many viewed conscriptions as an unjust mandate to fight in a controversial war. The draft’s influence extended beyond the military, affecting the nation’s social fabric and leaving a lasting legacy on the American consciousness.

The history of Coast Guard vessels in Vietnam is marked by a significant period during the Vietnam War when the U.S. Coast Guard deployed 82-foot Point-class patrol boats and high endurance cutters to support combat missions and provide vital services such as port security and search and rescue operations. These vessels were integral to the interdiction efforts, proving both adaptable and capable in the challenging conditions of war-torn Southeast Asia. The Vietnam Coast Guard, established in 1998, continues to play a crucial role in maintaining maritime security and safety. With a fleet that includes over 50 patrol boats and several offshore patrol vessels, the Vietnam Coast Guard is equipped to handle a variety of missions from search and rescue to combating smuggling and piracy. The development of the Vietnam Coast Guard reflects the country’s commitment to safeguarding its waters and contributing to regional stability.

The return home for Vietnam veterans was markedly different from the heroes’ welcome that greeted World War II servicemen. Vietnam veterans often faced a society that was at best indifferent and at worst hostile to them. The Vietnam War, mired in controversy and political turmoil, left returning soldiers to navigate a landscape of resentment and disillusionment. Unlike their predecessors, they received no victory parades or grand acknowledgments. Instead, many encountered a public that was deeply divided over the war and, by extension, the soldiers who fought in it. The treatment of these veterans reflected the nation’s conflicted feelings about the war itself, with some veterans reporting experiences of being met with insults or apathy rather than gratitude. This chilly reception was a stark contrast to the support and reverence shown to veterans of previous conflicts, highlighting a tumultuous era in American history where veterans’ sacrifices were overshadowed by the politics of war.

Transcript:

Mason Curles 0:00 Alright, so we’re gonna start the interview. I’m gonna ask you to introduce yourself.

Chester 0:03 My name is Chester Alvis. I’m Mason’s grandfather. I am 78 years old. I served in the Coast Guard, and I did do a term in Vietnam.

Mason Curles 0:20 All right, thank you. Um, first question, can you describe how you came to be in the Coast Guard?

Chester 0:27 Very easily, I got my draft notice, and I was A1. That was a period of time when guys were going to Canada, because it didn’t believe in, in the Vietnam War. Well, I for one, refuse to leave my country. I was gonna serve my country somehow, and I didn’t believe in going over there and shooting people. So, I joined the Coast Guard.

Mason Curles 0:58 And you said you were drafted, can you please describe what that process was, like?

Chester 1:03 I received a notice to report for military service, and like I said, I didn’t believe in Vietnam War, didn’t want to go over there. But I was not going to leave my country. I love my country. So, I decided I would serve in the Coast Guard, which is a means of serving this country. So I went to recruiter, and I told them, look, I got my draft notice, but I don’t want to go I’d rather go in the Coast Guard. And he says, don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of. So that’s the way it came to be. All right.

Mason Curles 1:35 And I understand there are a lot of there were a lot of expect–expectations of like Vietnam, like what it was like, like for a lot of people who are going over there. I’m sure you’re hearing a lot of it through newspaper and everything. Can you describe what some of your expectations were before you arrived?

Chester 1:53 Well, I didn’t have expectations of going to Vietnam. But my expectations of what was happening in Vietnam, was that there were major battles going on in a lot of people were dying, especially Americans. And it was something I couldn’t figure out why we were there. So, I feel like it was not a good thing to do.

Mason Curles 2:23 And how do you feel like your feelings changed? Like after getting there and after experiencing the things you experience like and while being station How do you feel your feelings changed over the course of being there?

Chester 2:41 Didn’t, didn’t change at all.

Mason Curles 2:44 Alright, what was contact with your family, like while you were stationed?

Chester 2:50 Not much, we had free mail, but we only got mail about maybe once every three months. So, it was very little contact, short of just letters.

Mason Curles 3:03 What kind of things would you write in the letters?

Chester 3:07 Boring things because our routine was not exactly something was exciting. There was a period of time where I had a reel-to-reel tape recorder. And somewhere here at the house, there’s two reels of firefights we got into. Our ship was a shallow draft, 311-foot naval vessel. We had a five-inch cannon with could shoot five miles accurately. And so we would go up into delta and anchor and we would support marine incursions into villages. And we sunk a lot of sand pans and things like that up in the Delta with it.

Mason Curles 3:58 And you were talking about routine, can you describe what your routine was like daily?

Chester 4:03 Well, it’s just like, in a factory or house. You had a job you went to every day. You did that job and then you got off. Well, I was a machinist. So, I was in a machine shop where if a part broke, we would make the part we would do maintenance. There was a funny time where nothing was going on. And we didn’t then it was one other guy, and we didn’t want to go and watch. So, we took a drill and went all over the ship drilling holes in the ductwork. So, we spent about two days doing that. Then went back and spent two days, putting screws into the holes. Then a couple days going back and painting the screws red. Somebody said

“What are y’all doing?”

We said, “Putting holes in the duct work.”

Mason Curles 5:05 That’s funny. What were some experiences during the war that changed your outlook on society and life in general?

Chester 5:18 The way the public treated people, soldiers, whether they were in Vietnam or not, they treated us like we were second class citizens. Now we were, we were supporting this country, defending this country. And as citizens acted like we were criminals. It hurt.

Mason Curles 5:44 Yeah

Chester 5:45 it’s affected me to the day. When I see somebody that’s in the military, I am so appreciative. I got to say something to em’

Mason Curles 6:01 How do you think the culture in Vietnam differed from the US? Or if you didn’t experience Vietnamese culture? How would you say you would like to experience to have experienced it?

Chester 6:14 How would I like to experience if the wall was not going on? I love travel. And I love being in places such as the street scenes, the street food, this street entertainment, meeting people. That in in Southeast Asia is the most fascinating thing you could ever imagine. The food is fantastic.

Mason Curles 6:47 And I understand we’ve already discussed what your return was like, but I’d like to ask you to further describe how you experienced returning back to the US?

Chester 7:00 Oh, well, I’ll go from return from Vietnam. We left Vietnam in the spring of 88. I think it was. I mean 68. And that was the time that South Korea, North Korea captured the US spy ship Pueblo. Well, it happened to be we will one of the closest vessels to, so for three days we drifted, waiting to see if we were gonna have to go in and fight for it. Luckily, diplomacy, reign supreme. And we came on back to Honolulu and spent 10 days in Honolulu before I flew back to stateside. And took me about two days to get home. I arrived home at two o’clock in the morning. Now I lived out in the country. I had caught a cab to go home, and I had $3 in my pocket. And I told the cab is here’s why I gotta go. When $3 runs out, just pull over let me out.

The cabbie asked me where I was coming from, and I told him, and he reached up and turned a meter off and said, “This ones on me.”

And he took me home. And I dropped my sea bag in the backyard. I still had the key to the door, and everything was quiet. And I just went on and I was standing in the middle of the house, totally dark. No sound. All of a sudden, my older sister who was there waiting for me. I heard her holler and come down the hallway. To hug me and it knocked me over. I sat on the sofa, and I didn’t go to bed until must be 12 o’clock that night. And the whole reason what the bed was I fell over asleep talking and it was so great to be home. Nobody could ever imagine how valuable this country is until you’ve been out of it. This is the greatest country God has ever created.

Mason Curles 9:47 In understand that you love to travel.

Chester 9:54 I do.

Mason Curles 9:55 And do you think that your time in the military affected your enthusiasm for travel?

Chester 10:03 It enhanced it and encouraged it. Because we went a lot of places. We were the first US military vessel to dock in Singapore after World War Two. Well, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, in the Philippines, I mean, I went everywhere. And it just, it just fueled my urge to travel. Because I love people. And everybody’s different.

Mason Curles 10:40 To wrap up, are there any final thoughts that you want to leave the listeners with?

Chester 10:48 Love this country. I can’t tell you how great this place is. We have freedoms and nobody in the world has. We have the opportunity to do what we want to do to make what we want out of ourselves. So many people around this world want to do something to improve themselves and can’t don’t have the opportunity. So, I think everybody in this country ought to get down on their hands and knees and kiss the ground of this country. It’s a greatest place on earth. And I’m sorry if I sound emotional, but I am. I love this country.

Mason Curles 11:31 All right. Well, thank you.

Chester 11:33 You’re quite welcome. Thank you for having me.

Interview Process: 

This interview was conducted in person over spring break. I spoke with my grandfather beforehand and worked very closely with him when composing this post. We spoke about how we would conduct the interview and the format that it would be taking. In order to gather information about him, for the biography, I called him and asked him the relevant and necessary questions. He was very open when providing information about himself and his past, most notably about his time in Vietnam. He even expressed his thanks following the interview, that he was able to share his experience and maybe help someone learn something. I very much so enjoyed this assignment and it brought we closer with my grandfather, helping me learn stuff about him that I had never known.

Transcription Process: 

Otter.ai was used to transcribe this interview. I listened to the audio to remove any lengthy gaps, distracting noises, or pointless talking before I started to transcribe. This was mostly done to compress the file and improve the audio quality. Otter AI did an excellent job of recording every interview on paper, but because of its clumsy mechanics and non-premium version, I felt that although working with Otter AI was useful, it was also incredibly time-consuming and sometimes annoying.

Follow up/Reflection: 

I did the follow up for the interview a couple days after approval to let the transcript linger in his head. When we had that actual conversation about the interview, he wasn’t very eager to talk about his time again saying “It was very hard for me to think about that time in my life again, I try to avoid it as much as possible. I don’t even watch war movies because they bring up very foul memories.” This was very eye opening for me because, even while doing the interview, I didn’t really grasp how he would feel talking about this stuff again. I did ask him a question that I wished I had asked during the interview but didn’t because it was such a difficult topic: what your experience of public treatment in detail was and how do you feel it compared to how you treated the Korean war veterans. His response: “Well, I was a young boy at the time so I didn’t have much interaction with the Korean war veterans, but from what I could get from the media and my parents was that they were treated almost as if they didn’t exist and the war never happened, which I would have much rathered over being spit on. It didn’t feel it fair to us (the Vietnam vets) that the public took out their hatred for the federal government and the military on us, as if we had a choice on whether we wanted to be there or not. I mean don’t get me wrong, some people did some heinous things over there, but I never knew those people, never had any connection with them. So why should I be blamed and hated in a country I love when I fought so hard to protect it.” This assignment was very beneficial for me and my relationship with my grandfather. I want to have sit down conversations like this with other people in my family to grasp and understand how my life differs from theirs. If I had any advice for next year, I would advise your students to take notes on this follow up because If I hadn’t, I would’ve never gotten this response exactly as he said it.

Bibliography: 

ERIKSON RS, STOKER L. Caught in the Draft: The Effects of Vietnam Draft Lottery Status on Political Attitudes.  American Political Science Review . 2011;105(2):221-237. doi:10.1017/S0003055411000141

Nelson, Robert T., and Douglas G. Currier. “Operation of Coast Guard Patrol Boats in Southeast Asia.”  Naval Engineers Journal 78.3 (1966): 403-408. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-3584.1966.tb05069.x

Vlieg, Heather (2019) “Were They Spat On? Understanding The Homecoming Experience of Vietnam Veterans,” Grand Valley Journal of History: Vol. 7: Iss. 1, Article 3. https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/gvjh/vol7/iss1/3

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Lesson Plan: Vietnam War Army Helicopter Pilot Dennis DuPuis

Introduction and Inspiration

Vietnam War Army helicopter pilot Dennis DuPuis talked about his inspiration for flying attack helicopters during his two tours in the War.

Description

This lesson focuses on the experiences of Dennis DuPuis, a U.S. Army helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War. The lesson opens with two reflective questions that ask students to consider the roles that pilots play during wartime and reflect on what they already know about the Vietnam War. Students then view an introductory video clip in which DuPuis talks about his inspiration for flying attack helicopters during his two tours in the War. Next, students view and analyze three video clips that provide background information about DuPuis’ Army training and arrival in Vietnam. From there, students learn about DuPuis’ experiences during the Vietnam War by watching and analyzing seven video clips. Students then view and analyze a final video clip in which DuPuis summarizes his closing experiences during the War. Finally, students respond to a summative writing prompt that asks them to "assess the impact of the [Vietnam] War on military service members."

This lesson offers several options for you to use with your students whether you are teaching in class, using a hybrid model, or engaging through distance learning. It can be completed in steps as a class or students can move at their own pace and complete the activities independently.

You can post links to the videos in the lesson along with the related handout and engage in discussion to share responses on a discussion board or learning management system.

You can also save and share the following Google resource for students to use with this lesson.

Handout: Graphic Organizer (Google Doc).

In Google, choose "File" then "Make a Copy" to get your own copy. You can make any needed adjustments in the instructions such as which activities students need to complete, when it is due, etc. and then make it available to them via Google.

Pose the following brainstorming questions to your students, directing them to record their responses in their graphic organizer, share with a partner, and then with the class if they choose.

• What role(s) do pilots play during wartime?
• Summarize what you know about the Vietnam War.

INTRODUCTION

Play the following introductory video clip of Vietnam War Army helicopter pilot Dennis DuPuis talking about his inspiration for flying attack helicopters during his two tours in the War. Direct your students to answer the related question on their graphic organizer and share their findings with a partner, small group, or the class when finished.

Clip #1: Introduction and Inspiration (2:19).

• What was Dennis DuPuis’ “inspiration” to be a helicopter pilot?
• Based on the clip, what connections did DuPuis’ family have to the military?
• What was “another inspiration” for DuPuis?

Direct your students to their graphic organizers to view and define the vocabulary terms that will appear in the lesson in the chart in their graphic organizer handout. The vocabulary words are also listed to the right on this webpage.

We recommend having your students complete the activity in a jigsaw format to save time. Or, depending on time and resources, you may consider having your students engage in a Frayer's Model activity , where each student is responsible for completing one or two items. Students can then post their models around the room for reference throughout the lesson.

Note: this is not an all-encompassing list of terms included in each video. We recommend you preview the video clips to determine any necessary additions/subtractions to this list for your specific students .

Direct students to the Background section of their graphic organizers. Instruct your students to view the following three video clips that provide background information about Dennis DuPuis’ Army training and arrival in Vietnam. Direct your students to answer the related questions on their graphic organizer and share their findings with a partner, small group, or the class when finished.

Clip #2: Basic Training (3:00).

• What was a “mattel messerschmitt?”
• What skills were taught by “warrant officers” during flight school?
• Based on the clip, how long did the pilot training process take and where did it occur?
• According to Dennis DuPuis, which helicopter were pilots trained on last? Why?

Clip #3: Flight School (2:14).

• How many days of “leave” were offered between flight school graduation and deployment to Vietnam?
• Based on the clip, was it difficult to get into flight school?
• What advice did Dennis DuPuis get from his dad?
• According to DuPuis, what were the requirements to get into flight school?

Clip #4: On to Vietnam (3:16).

• What challenge did Dennis DuPuis face shortly after his flight school graduation?
• Who was “Mr. Willingham,” and how did he help DuPuis?
• According to DuPuis, what did he experience after arriving at Bien Hoa in Vietnam?
• Why was DuPuis “scared” while en route to Long Binh?

Direct students to the Engagement section of their graphic organizers. Instruct your students to view the following seven video clips that detail Dennis DuPuis’ experiences during the Vietnam War. Direct your students to answer the related questions on their graphic organizer and share their findings with a partner, small group, or the class when finished.

Clip #5: Muc Wa (6:35).

• What did helicopter pilots do during “combat assaults?”
• Based on the clip, what different roles existed during night missions?
• According to Dennis DuPuis, what issue occurred on one such night mission?
• Who responded to the “mayday” call, and what happened to the crew?

Clip #6: Camp Bearcat (4:10).

• Why was Dennis DuPuis transferred to Camp “Bearcat?”
• Where was Bearcat’s normal “area of operations?”
• How were the single-ship missions at Bearcat like a “milk run?”
• What happened during one “routine” mission during December 1969?

Clip #7: Aircraft Commander (7:38).

• According to Dennis DuPuis, what promotion did he receive in January 1970 and what new responsibilities did he have?
• How did “motivation” differ for Americans and Vietnamese? Explain.
• Summarize what happened during one “day mission” in February 1970.
• What was discovered after the crew got the “return to base” order?

Clip #8: March 1970 (6:25).

• What was the responsibility of the “trail” ship?
• Based on the clip, which flight out of the primary zone was the most dangerous? Why?
• Summarize what happened during the mission, according to Dennis DuPuis’ poem.
• What happened “the very next day?”

Clip #9: Invasion of Cambodia (6:15).

• What was Dennis DuPuis “full of” during the invasion of Cambodia? Why?
• Summarize the “mission” that was DuPuis assigned during the invasion and what he encountered on the first day.
• Based on the clip, what happened to DuPuis during a mission the next week?
• What “lesson” did DuPuis learn that day, and how did the crew make it back to base?

Clip #10: Special Mission (2:32).

• Why did Dennis DuPuis have “visions of grandeur” after returning to Bearcat?
• What “set of orders” was DuPuis given?
• Summarize DuPuis’ duties and experiences as a “body escort.”
• What “gift” was DuPuis given? Explain.

Clip #11: Downtime (2:26).

• Summarize the audience member’s question.
• How were missions “generated?” Explain.
• Based on the clip, how were pilot hours managed and how were pilots assigned to missions?
• How does flying time in “today’s Army” compare to the Vietnam War era?

After your students finish sharing their findings from the last section, direct them to the Reflection section of their graphic organizers. Instruct your students to view the following final video clip in which Vietnam War Army helicopter pilot Dennis DuPuis summarizes his closing experiences during the War. Direct your students to answer the related questions and share their findings with a partner, small group, or the class when finished.

Clip #12: Last Experiences (1:04).

• Upon returning to Vietnam, what role did Dennis DuPuis have during the “last 30 days” of his first tour? What happened?
• Based on the clip, why did DuPuis come back to the United States for a year?
• What was DuPuis’ role after being trained as a “Cobra attack pilot” during his second tour in Vietnam?

After your students are finished with the lesson, direct them to complete the final culminating writing prompt and have students share their responses, comparing their perspectives with their classmates' perspectives: Having learned about Dennis DuPuis’ experiences as a Vietnam War Army helicopter pilot, assess the impact of the War on military service members . Be sure to include evidence from the video clips in the lesson to support your argument .

Related Articles

• The Coming of Age: The Role of the Helicopter in the Vietnam War (U.S. Army Transportation Corps)
• 6 Iconic Helicopters Deployed in the Vietnam War (HISTORY)
• Helicopters (Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund)
• Vietnam War (Britannica)

Additional Resources

• On This Day: The Silent Majority
• On This Day: Mayday Protests
• On This Day: The May 4th Shootings at Kent State
• Video Clip: Senator John McCain on the Legacies of the Vietnam War
• Video Clip: Ken Burns on Lessons Learned from the Vietnam War
• Bell Ringer: The Vietnam War Today
• Bell Ringer: The Weather Underground and the 1971 Bombing of the Capitol
• Bell Ringer: Teaching Combat Surgery - Vietnam War Era
• Bell Ringer: Donut Dollies
• Bell Ringer: Paris Peace Accords
• Lesson Plan: Michael O’Donnell: Vietnam War Helicopter Pilot
• Lesson Plan: Vietnam War POWs
• Lesson Plan: Female Journalists During the Vietnam War
• Lesson Plan: 1968 in Images
• Lesson Plan: The Vietnam War
• Agent Orange
• Area Of Operation
• Cambodian Campaign (1970)
• Chinook Helicopter
• Cobra Helicopter
• Huey Helicopter
• Landing Zone
• Military Police
• Missing In Action
• Pickup Zone
• Return To Base
• Rocket-propelled Grenade
• Vietnam War (1955-75)

Why Did U.S. Planes Defend Israel but Not Ukraine?

There are lessons for other nations in the events of the past few days.

On April 13, the Islamic Republic of Iran launched missiles and drones at Israel. Also on April 13, as well as on April 12, 14, and 15, the Russian Federation launched missiles and drones at Ukraine—including some designed in Iran.

Few of the weapons launched by Iran hit their mark. Instead, American and European airplanes, alongside Israeli and even Jordanian airplanes, knocked the drones and missiles out of the sky.

By contrast, some of the attacks launched by Russia did destroy their targets. Ukraine, acting alone, and—thanks to the Republican leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives—running short on defensive ammunition, was unable to knock all of the drones and missiles out of the sky. On April 12 Russian strikes badly damaged an energy facility in Dnipropetrovsk. On April 13, a 61-year-old woman and 68-year-old man were killed by a Russian strike in Kharkiv. On April 14, an aerial bomb hit an apartment building in Ocheretyne, killing one and injuring two. On April 15, a Russian guided missile hit a school and killed at least two more people in the Kharkiv region.

Eliot A. Cohen: The ‘Israel model’ won’t work for Ukraine

Why the difference in reaction? Why did American and European jets scramble to help Israel, but not Ukraine? Why doesn’t Ukraine have enough matériel to defend itself? One difference is the balance of nuclear power. Russia has nuclear weapons, and its propagandists periodically threaten to use them. That has made the U.S. and Europe reluctant to enter the skies over Ukraine. Israel also has nuclear weapons, but that affects the calculus in a different way: It means that the U.S., Europe, and even some Arab states are eager to make sure that Israel is never provoked enough to use them, or indeed to use any serious conventional weapons, against Iran.

A second difference between the two conflicts is that the Republican Party remains staunchly resistant to propaganda coming from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Leading Republicans do not sympathize with the mullahs, do not repeat their talking points, and do not seek to appease them when they make outrageous claims about other countries. That enables the Biden administration to rush to the aid of Israel, because no serious opposition will follow.

By contrast, a part of the Republican Party, including its presidential candidate, does sympathize with the Russian dictatorship, does repeat its talking points, and does seek to appease Russia when it invades and occupies other countries. The absence of bipartisan solidarity around Ukraine means that the Republican congressional leadership has prevented the Biden administration from sending even defensive weapons and ammunition to Ukraine. The Biden administration appears to feel constrained and unable to provide Ukraine with the spontaneous assistance that it just provided to Israel.

Open sympathy for the war aims of the Russian state is rarely stated out loud. Instead, some leading Republicans have begun, in the past few months, to argue that Ukraine should “shift to a defensive war,” to give up any hope of retaining its occupied territory, or else stop fighting altogether. Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, in a New York Times essay written in what can only be described as extraordinary bad faith, made exactly this argument just last week. So too, for example, did Republican Representative Eli Crane of Arizona, who has said that military aid for Ukraine “should be totally off the table and replaced with a push for peace talks.”

Eliot A. Cohen: The war is not going well for Ukraine

But Ukraine is already fighting a defensive war. The matériel that the Republicans are refusing to send includes—let me repeat it again—defensive munitions. There is no evidence whatsoever that cutting off any further aid to Ukraine would end the fighting or bring peace talks. On the contrary, all of the evidence indicates that blocking aid would allow Russia to advance faster, take more territory, and eventually murder far more Ukrainians, as Vance and Crane surely know. Without wanting to put it that boldly, they seem already to see themselves in some kind of alliance with Russia, and therefore they want Ukraine to be defeated. They do not see themselves in alliance with Iran, despite the fact that Iran and Russia would regard one another as partners.

For the rest of the world, there are some lessons here. Plenty of countries, perhaps including Ukraine and Iran, will draw the first and most obvious conclusion: Nuclear weapons make you much safer. Not only can you deter attacks with a nuclear shield, and not only can you attack other countries with comparative impunity, but you can also, under certain circumstances, expect others to join in your defense.

Perhaps others will draw the other obvious conclusion: A part of the Republican Party—one large enough to matter—can be co-opted, lobbied, or purchased outright. Not only can you get it to repeat your propaganda, but you can also get it to act directly in your interests. This probably doesn’t cost even a fraction of the price of tanks and artillery, and it can be far more effective.

No doubt many will make use of both of these lessons in the future.

People taken into custody at NYU as pro-Palestinian campus protests escalate across U.S.

Rising tensions on campuses

• Multiple people were taken into custody tonight at New York University, city officials confirmed, adding that officers responded to the campus after university officials requested police. The number was unclear.
• Police officers arrested protesters who had set up an encampment on Yale University ’s campus in support of the Palestinian cause. In total, 47 students were issued summonses, the university said.
• In New York City, classes at Columbia University were held virtually today amid reports of antisemitic and offensive statements and actions on and near its campus.
• Last week more than 100 Columbia students were arrested after the administration called police to report the students as a danger to campus. NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell told the student newspaper that there were no reports of violence or injuries and that the students were "peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever."
• Pro-Palestinian encampments have also been established at the University of Michigan, New York University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt.
• The escalated tension comes ahead of this evening's start of the Jewish holiday of Passover.

Coverage on this live blog has ended. Follow the latest news on the campus protests here.

Cal Poly Humboldt in California closes campus after occupation of building

Phil Helsel

California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, said campus is closed through Wednesday after protesters demonstrating against the war in Gaza occupied Siemens Hall on the campus in Arcata.

“The University is deeply concerned about the safety of the protestors who have barricaded themselves inside the building. The University is urgently asking that the protestors listen to directives from law enforcement that have responded and to peacefully leave the building,” it said in a statement.

It asked the campus community to avoid the area of the building, "as it is a dangerous and volatile situation."

Cal Poly Humboldt has an undergrad enrollment of around 5,800. Humboldt is on the California coast in the northwestern part of the state, near the Oregon border.

MIT students demand school call for cease-fire

The Associated Press

Prahlad Iyengar, an MIT graduate student studying electrical engineering, was among about two dozen students who set up a tent encampment on the school’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus Sunday evening. They are calling for a cease-fire and are protesting what they describe as MIT’s “complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” he said.

“MIT has not even called for a cease-fire, and that’s a demand we have for sure,” Iyengar said.

He also said MIT has been sending out confusing rules about protests.

“We’re out here to demonstrate that we reserve the right to protest. It’s an essential part of living on a college campus,” Iyengar said.

Police 'ready' to remove protesters again at NYU's request: NYPD official

A New York Police Department deputy commissioner tonight shared the letter sent by New York University to the police department asking police to clear Gaza war protesters from its Manhattan campus who refused to leave.

Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry also on social media said that if called upon, the NYPD would do it again.

"There is a pattern of behavior occurring on campuses across our nation, in which individuals attempt to occupy a space in defiance of school policy,” Daughtry wrote on X . “ Rest assured, in NYC the NYPD stands ready to address these prohibited and subsequently illegal actions whenever we are called upon.”

Police took multiple people into custody at NYU’s Gould Plaza while clearing the protesters, the police department said. The number of those arrested, as well as charges, were not available from police early Tuesday.

The letter from NYU posted by Daughtry said the protesters refused to leave and that the university considered them to be trespassers and asked for police help.

Fountain Walker, head of NYU Global Campus Safety, said on social media that the university had given the demonstrators until 4 p.m. to leave. Walker said that barricades had been breached and “we witnessed disorderly, disruptive, and antagonizing behavior that has interfered with the safety and security of our community.”

Columbia to offer hybrid learning for classes on main campus until summer

Classes at Columbia University’s main campus will be hybrid, if the technology permits it, until the end of the spring semester, Provost Angela V. Olinto said in guidance to the Manhattan institution, which has had demonstrations over the war in Gaza.

Faculty with classes equipped with hybrid technology “should enable them to provide virtual learning options to students who need such a learning modality,” she wrote.

Those without should hold classes remotely if students request it, she wrote. The guidance applies to the university’s main campus in Morningside Heights.

There have been large demonstrations over the war in Gaza, and last week over 100 people were arrested there after the university asked the NYPD to remove protesters who occupied a space on campus for more than 30 hours.

Columbia President President Minouche Shafik said in a letter to the university community today that "I am deeply saddened by what is happening on our campus."

"The decibel of our disagreements has only increased in recent days," Shafik said. "These tensions have been exploited and amplified by individuals who are not affiliated with Columbia who have come to campus to pursue their own agendas. We need a reset."

She added that "over the past days, there have been too many examples of intimidating and harassing behavior on our campus" and that antisemitic language will not be tolerated.

Barnard offers suspended students a deal

Barnard College says it has offered the students who were suspended after a 30-hour encampment protest at Columbia last week a way to get off interim suspension.

The students were suspended after police cleared the encampment, set up in support of Gaza, on April 18. New York police arrested more than 100 people.

Barnard President Laura Ann Rosenbury said in a letter today that “the vast majority of the students on interim suspension have not previously engaged in misconduct under Barnard’s rules.”

“Last night, the College sent written notices to these students offering to lift the interim suspensions, and immediately restore their access to College buildings, if they agree to follow all Barnard rules during a probationary period,” Rosenbury said.

If they do, the incident will not appear on transcripts or reportable student disciplinary records, she said.

More than 108 people were arrested during the demonstration, authorities have said.

Students mark Passover with interfaith Seders

Alicia Victoria Lozano

Tavleen Tarrant

BERKELEY, Calif. — Jewish students have organized interfaith Passover Seders at the Gaza solidarity encampments at college campuses across the U.S.

Photos and videos from Columbia University in New York City and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor were shared online and show students in keffiyeh scarves, surrounded by tents, sitting down to a Passover Seder.

A spokesperson for the Jewish Voice for Peace chapter at the University of California, Berkeley, said the group would also be hosting a Seder.

“A lot of us had other plans for our first-night Seder, but we want to observe Passover with our community,” said a spokesperson for Berkeley’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. “It’s a strange time dealing with the story of Passover.”

N.J. man charged with hate crime in break-in at Rutgers Islamic center

A 24-year-old New Jersey man has been charged with a federal hate crime and accused of breaking into an Islamic center on the campus of Rutgers University this month, federal prosecutors said today.

Jacob Beacher, of Somerset County, is charged with one count of intentional or attempted obstruction of religious practice and one count of making false statements to federal authorities, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey said in a statement .

Beacher is accused of breaking into the Center for Islamic Life at the New Brunswick campus around 2:40 a.m. April 10.

He broke through the glass pane of a rear door to unlock it, an FBI special agent wrote in an affidavit associated with the criminal complaint, and then allegedly damaged religious artifacts and stole a Palestinian flag.

Around $40,000 in damage was done, the affidavit says. When he was questioned, Beacher said he was the person in surveillance video near the center, but he denied breaking into the building, the FBI agent wrote.

A suspected motive is not described in the affidavit. A federal public defender listed in court records as representing Beacher did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Court records show Beacher was being held in custody.

U.S. Holocaust Museum calls on colleges to address ‘shocking eruption of antisemitism’ on campuses

The U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., today called on colleges to do more to address what it called a “shocking eruption of antisemitism” on campuses due to tensions over the war in Gaza.

“Demonstrators at Columbia University calling for Jews to return to Poland — where three million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators — is an outrageous insult to Holocaust memory, a failure to appreciate its lessons, and an act of dangerous antisemitism,” the Holocaust Museum said in a statement .

“America is hardly the Third Reich, but the Holocaust teaches the dangers of pervasive societal antisemitism, and awareness of this history must guide our actions in the present,” it said. “Nazi ideology was official state policy, but it found a  receptive audience  on university campuses based on well established contempt towards Jews.”

In  a letter shared yesterday on social media , Chabad at Columbia University said students have had offensive rhetoric hurled at them, including being told to “go back to Poland” and “stop killing children.”

Demonstrators taken into custody at NYU

New York police said they took multiple people into custody at New York University tonight after the university called police and requested the removal of demonstrators.

How many people were taken into custody was not immediately clear. Video from the Manhattan campus showed police with helmets and batons and warning people to leave.

NYU said on social media earlier that protesters had until 4 p.m. to leave Gould Plaza after barricades were breached and after “we witnessed disorderly, disruptive, and antagonizing behavior that has interfered with the safety and security of our community.”

Video tonight showed some demonstrators chanting “NYPD KKK” and “shame on you.”

The NYPD arrested more than 100 people last week at a Gaza protest encampment at Columbia University, also in Manhattan. Columbia had also requested police assistance, officials said.

Jewish students march in solidarity

BERKELEY, Calif. — Jewish students at several college campuses are marching in solidarity with demonstrators calling for an end to the war in Gaza and the divestment of universities from Israeli companies.

At the University of California, Berkeley, in the San Francisco Bay Area, members of the local Jews for Peace chapter camped alongside pro-Palestinian protesters on the Mario Savio steps, named after a founding member of the Free Speech Movement.

A spokesperson for the group, which plans an interfaith Passover Seder tonight, said members are there to "protect" the free speech of anti-war demonstrators.

At the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Jews for Peace members held signs that read "Jews say no to genocide" and "Anti Zionism is not antisemitism."

Columbia student organizers condemn hate; NYPD says arrests will be made 'if there is a crime'

Doha Madani

Michael Gerber, the deputy New York police commissioner for legal matters, told reporters that officers would step in if crimes were committed on or around Columbia University's campus as some Jewish students express fear for their safety.

He said that includes "harassment or threats or menacing or stalking or anything like that that is not protected by the First Amendment."

Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, one of the student groups organizing the protest, condemned hate and bigotry in a statement yesterday. The statement blamed nonstudents outside the encampment for inciting harmful incidents over the weekend.

"We have been peaceful," the statement said. "We follow in the footsteps of the civil rights and anti-war movements in our quest for liberation."

Barnard faculty member calls for suspensions to be lifted

Barnard University faculty member Jackie Orr was out with protesters today “because of an unfolding genocide in Gaza” and to show support for students and staff members.

Orr said she was there specifically to join calls for Barnard and associated Columbia University cancel the suspensions of students who were suspended last week after they refused to leave an encampment to show support for Gaza.

The Barnard students have been evicted from their dorms, dining halls and classrooms and all of campus, she said.

“We’re here to demand that the universities immediately unsuspend those students — over 50 students at Barnard are without housing, without access to the classrooms and the faculty, without access to food,” Orr said.

Orr said it is the responsibility of faculty members to stand for students and support the speech of all students.

“The only students whose political speech and activism has been surveyed, targeted and punished have been students who have been speaking in solidarity with Palestine and students who have been speaking and acting forcefully against a genocidal war,” she said.

Barnard and Columbia, across the street from each other in Manhattan, have a partnership and students share facilities.

Patriots owner Kraft says he won’t support Columbia until changes made

New England Patriots owner and Columbia University alumnus Robert Kraft said today he will no longer support the university “until corrective action is taken."

In a statement , Kraft, who graduated from Columbia in 1963, said the university “is no longer an institution I recognize.”

“I am deeply saddened at the virulent hate that continues to grow on campus and throughout our country. I am no longer confident that Columbia can protect its students and staff and I am not comfortable supporting the university until corrective action is taken,” he said.

“It is my hope that Columbia and its leadership will stand up to this hate by ending these protests immediately and will work to earn back the respect and trust of the many of us who have lost faith in the institution,” he said.

Pro-Palestinian student group at Harvard says it has been suspended

Dennis Romero

The Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee said on its social media platforms today that it has been suspended by the institution.

Harvard's public affairs and communications office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The group, also known as Harvard for Palestine, has helped organize protests on campus in solidarity with pro-Palestinian encampments and protests at Columbia University, Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The organization National Students for Justice in Palestine said on X the suspension at Harvard was "intended to prevent students from replicating the solidarity encampments" across the country.

Columbia undergraduate students approve referendums on divestment, ending ties to Tel Aviv

Columbia College, the undergraduate liberal arts school at Columbia University, voted to approve three referendums today calling on the school to divest from Israel as well as cut its ties to Tel Aviv.

According to the student-run Columbia Spectator , the three referendums urged the school to divest funding from Israel, end its dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University and close its Global Center in Tel Aviv. The votes are an indicator of the student's wishes but do not change university policy.

A university spokesperson told the Spectator that the school "welcomes and embraces the Israeli students, faculty, and staff on our campus."

"We are proud of our students and military veterans from Israel and around the world whose experience adds considerable value to the classroom and beyond,” the spokesperson said.

UC Berkeley becomes first West Coast campus to join call for solidarity

BERKELEY, Calif. — Dozens of students gathered on the Savio Steps, named for Mario Savio, the leader of the 1960s Free Speech Movement, at the University of California, Berkeley, today to protest the Israel-Hamas war and the UC system’s investments in companies that do business with Israel.

Protesters said they planned to set up an encampment on campus as UC Berkeley became the first West Coast university to join a call for solidarity among colleges across the country to show their opposition to Israel’s military action in Gaza.

The Savio Steps lead to Sproul Hall, which housed the offices of the chancellor and administrators in the 1960s and were occupied by students from the Free Speech Movement. 

The movement is considered the first mass act of  civil disobedience  on a U.S. campus in the ’60s as students demanded the school lift a ban on on-campus political activity and secure their right to free speech and academic freedom.

‘We’re going to keep demanding for a free Palestine,’ Yale protester says after arrests

The arrests of 47 students at Yale University this morning will not dissuade people from calling for the Ivy League school to disclose its investments and divest from companies linked to war or weapons, a student vowed today.

“This morning, the cops completely ambushed us. It was 6:40 a.m.; most people were still asleep,” Yale protester Chisato Kimura told NBC Connecticut .

Demonstrators had been gathering on Beinecke Plaza on the campus in New Haven all last week, and Kimura said that when their demands of Yale went unanswered, they began taking up space with people and tents on the plaza over the weekend.

“We’re going to keep demanding for a free Palestine,” Kimura said. She said some of the people arrested had already returned to protests by this afternoon.

Kimura said that the protesters want Yale to make it clear that it is not investing in ways connected to weapons or war but that Yale has refused their request for disclosure. “We don’t want to be complicit as students,” she said.

“I don’t know what Yale was thinking when they arrested the students, but if they thought they were going to shut us up or make us quiet — I mean, it completely backfired,” Kimura told NBC Connecticut as a rally was being held.

Yale said in a statement that it repeatedly warned students that continuing to violate university policies could result in action that included arrest and that it tried to negotiate with students to leave the plaza without success. It said that negotiations ended at 11:30 p.m. and that today Yale issued summonses to people who refused to leave voluntarily. 

Yale also said that it "became aware of police reports identifying harmful acts and threatening language used against individuals at or near the protest sites," some by people from Yale and some from outsiders. Several hundred people were at the plaza over the weekend, the university said.

Michigan students establish encampment in heart of campus

Protesters at the University of Michigan renewed their criticism of Israeli warfare today by erecting an encampment in the heart of the Ann Arbor campus, on the Diag, or Diagonal Green.

The protest was organized in part by the group Transparency Accountability Humanity Reparations Investment Resistance, better known as the TAHRIR Coalition.

Earlier in the day students marched along the Diag chanting, "If you don't get no justice, we don't get no peace."

The coalition's main goal is university divestment from companies or funds that support Israel's war in Gaza, home to a population that has faced mass displacement since Hamas militants' Oct. 7 surprise attack on Israel.

The university has addressed the demand previously, with Regent Michael Behm saying in late March: "The endowment has no direct investment in any Israeli company. What we do have are funds that one of those companies may be part of a fund. Less than 1/10 of 1% of the endowment is invested indirectly in such companies."

University of Michigan police did not immediately respond to a request for information about its response to today's actions on campus.

Biden condemns antisemitic protests, 'those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians'

Alexandra Bacallao

Zoë Richards

Reporters asked Biden in Triangle, Virginia, this afternoon for his message to protestors and whether he condemned antisemitic demonstrations on college campuses.

“I condemn the antisemitic protests; that’s why I’ve set up a program to deal with that," Biden told reporters.

“I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians,” he added.

The comment appeared to be a reference to an effort announced last year to initiate partnerships between the departments of Justice and Homeland Security   and campus law enforcement agencies to track hate-related threats and supply schools with federal resources to combat a rise in antisemitism.

Rep. Ilhan Omar praises solidarity movement on campuses

Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., praised the solidarity emerging as campuses across the country protest the Israel-Hamas war after faculty at Columbia University staged a walkout over the administration’s crackdown.

“On Thursday, Columbia arrested and suspended its students who were peacefully protesting and have now ignited a nationwide Gaza Solidarity movement,” Omar wrote on X. “This is more than the students hoped for and I am glad to see this type of solidarity.”

Omar’s daughter, Isra Hirsi, was arrested participating in the protests and suspended from Columbia’s nearby sister school, Barnard College. Omar said she was “enormously proud” of her daughter.

Hirsi  told MSNBC  she believed the school targeted for suspension students who were speaking to the media. She denied the protest encampment on campus was threatening, describing it as a “beautiful” community and saying students held Shabbat during that time.

Columbia courses go virtual as protests continue; faculty stage walkout in support

Students at Columbia University are on their sixth day of camping out on the school's South Lawn, a re-creation of an anti-war demonstration students held in 1968 opposing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Columbia President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik said today that classes would be held virtually and that school leaders would be coming together to discuss a way to bring an end to “this crisis.” The original 1968 protests lasted roughly a week before police forcibly removed students in full-scale police riots , alumnus Oren Root described in an opinion essay.

A large group of faculty members staged a walkout today in support of students. Students were arrested last week when the school administration asked police to remove students, citing a threat to safety, though NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell told the Columbia Spectator that the protestors were peaceful and "offered no resistance whatsoever."

The Columbia encampment has inspired similar demonstrations at other campuses, including New York University, Yale University and the University of California, Berkeley. Protesters have also gathered outside the gate to Columbia University, where antisemitic incidents and aggressive crowds have been reported.

Pro-Palestinian supporters arrested at encampment on Yale plaza

Marlene Lenthang

Police officers   today arrested protesters who had set up an encampment on Yale University’s campus   in support of the Palestinian cause,   one of a  growing number of American universities  where there have been demonstrations surrounding the Israel-Hamas war.

Protesters had been on their third night of camping out to urge Yale to divest from military weapons manufacturers, the  Yale Daily News  reported.

Officers gathered at the protest site at Beinecke Plaza shortly before 7 a.m. Monday   and were   seen approaching the encampment and “flipping up the entrances to the tents,” the school paper wrote on X.

Then officers issued a warning for students and journalists to leave or they’d be arrested. Minutes later, the school paper wrote on X that police were arresting people.

In total, 47 students were issued summonses, Yale said in a  statement  today.  

Read the full story here.

A high-energy crowd at NYU

People gathered in front of New York University's Stern School of Business to protest on Gould Plaza this afternoon. The crowd maintained high energy while chanting “free Palestine." The group also held a communal prayer and observed a moment of silence for those who have died in Gaza.

New York police were on the scene.

A few people gathered across the street, with at least one person holding an Israeli flag.

Karely Perez, an NYU alumna, said she joined the protest to show her support for the student organizations behind the encampment.

“Once the students start getting mad, things start to change,” she said.

Perez said she was proud of the students and added that although the encampments on university campuses are new, pro-Palestinian activism has always existed at schools like NYU.