Vietnam War

Introduction

Psychologically, the Vietnam War was almost as traumatic as the Civil War. It is still a painful memory and the subject of ill-tempered debates regarding victory and defeat, imperialism and Communism, good intentions and limited resources, deceit and patriotism. Misinformation abounds on the topic--students often have the idea that the United States Army was defeated in combat by a Viet-Cong guerrilla force--something that definitely did not happen. This article takes primarily the perspective of the U.S. to explore what was the American military's mission, how was it carried it out, and what were the effects.

While the United States lost none of the battles, somehow it lost the war. From 1964 to 1972 debate raged between "doves" (who wanted the US to cut its losses and get out) and "hawks" (who wanted to win.) Many soldiers believe victory was thrown away because, as General Hamilton H. Howze said when Saigon finally fell to the Communists in 1975, "America itself lost much of its will to fight and the politicians and the press began their program of vilification." Howze's rhetoric says more about the military's role in society and its own battered self image than it does about Vietnam. Much of the intensity of the debate during the 1960s sprang not from what was happening in Asia, but what was happening on the home front. A social revolution saw many people (especially blacks, students and feminists) in revolt against tight restrictive rules and roles that confined individuals into boxes of race, gender, age and class. Favorite targets of the revolt included all traditional sources of order, discipline and hierarchy, such as the police, the military, and the government itself. The social revolt of the 1960s was by no means limited to the US--parallel upheavals took place in Europe, Japan, and even China. The Vietnam War inevitably became the target of opportunity. The history of the small war is unusually complicated because it lasted so long, involved so many twists and turns of policy and strategy. The turnover of Americans was unusually high (2.5 million were stationed there), so that the many veterans each have a different story to tell. To appreciate the complexity it is necessary to start with the French imperialists of the 19th century.

Origins

French "Indochina" Background

In the late 19th century the French expanded their global empire to southeast Asia, by acquiring control of Vietnam, and the neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos. The Chinese war lords who had been in charge were expelled, replaced by a French governor supported by rotating units of the French army and several thousand French civil servants. Few Frenchmen permanently settled in Indochina. Below the top layer of imperial control, the civil service comprised French-speaking Catholic Vietnamese; a nominal "Emperor" resided in Hue. Paris had hoped to make a profit from its empire, but instead the expenses of building roads, railroads, ports, utilities, schools and other infrastructure, not to mention the military and civil service salaries, far outpaced the modest profits from rice and rubber exports. Little industry developed and 80% of the population lived in villages of about 2000 population; they depended on rice growing. Most were nominally Buddhist; about 10% were Catholic. Minorities included the Chinese merchants who controlled most of the commerce, and Montagnard tribesmen in the thinly populated Central Highlands. Vietnam was a relatively peaceful colony; sporadic independence movements were quickly suppressed by the efficient French secret police.

Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) and fellow students founded the Communist party in Paris in 1929, but it was of marginal importance until World War II. In 1940 and 1941 the Vichy regime yielded control of Vietnam to the Japanese, and Ho returned to lead an underground independence movement (which received a little assistance from the O.S.S., the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency CIA). President Franklin D. Roosevelt detested French colonialism, but Truman was more interested in helping restore French prestige in Europe, so he helped them to return in 1946. In contrast with other Asian colonies like India, Burma, the Philippines and Korea, Vietnam was not given its independence after the war. As in Indonesia (the Dutch East Indies), an indigenous rebellion demanded independence. While the Netherlands was too weak to resist the Indonesians, the French were strong enough to just barely hold on. As a result Ho and his "Viet Minh" launched a guerrilla campaign, using Communist China as a sanctuary when French pursuit became hot. When the Korean War erupted in 1950, Washington saw Vietnam as another target of Communist expansion, and began to fund about three-fourths of the French military efforts. However, the goals of Washington and Paris were incompatible. Washington wanted a democratic Vietnam independent of both France and Communism, while Paris was more interested in restoring its old empire than in fighting Communism. In 1950 the U.S. officially recognized the theoretical independence of the "State of Vietnam," even though Paris kept control of its foreign and military policy.

Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Accords, 1954

To cut Viet Minh supply lines from China, the French built a fort at remote Dien Bien Phu. In 1954, 12,000 defenders were surrounded and battered by General Vo Nguyen Giap, who unexpectedly had artillery supplied by Communist China. Paris begged Washington for air strikes. The US Navy wanted to send its carriers into action but the US Army demurred, arguing it would be "a dangerous strategic diversion of limited U.S. military capabilities... [to] a non-decisive theatre." For the Army, containment meant holding back the Russian divisions in central Europe, not chasing guerrillas in Asian jungles. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man who led the war against Germany in 1944-45 and who commanded NATO in 1950, agreed with the Army. With the Korean stalemate resolved only a few months earlier, he rejected the advice of hawkish aides (including Vice President Richard Nixon) and refused to fight another land war in Asia.

Dien Bien Phu surrendered, the French government collapsed, and a Socialist government with Communist support came to power in Paris, pledged to get out of Vietnam in 30 days. The American policy of bankrolling the French had failed. At the 1954 Geneva Conference, the French signed agreements with the Viet Minh that amounted to a surrender; the French did not consult the government in Saigon. Because of American pressure, however, Paris did not give Ho Chi Minh all he demanded (he demanded all of Vietnam). A permanent cease fire was promised, and the country was split along the 17th parallel, with the north turned over to Ho's Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). The French promised to leave the southern half, which for the time being would continue as the independent State of Vietnam with the Emperor as head of state and a Catholic anti-communist as premier. The Geneva Accords called for "free general elections by secret ballot" in 1956 to unify the country. Washington and Saigon both rejected the Geneva Accords: they were both determined to build an independent, anti-Communist South Vietnam. Some observers thought Ho was so popular for having driven the French out that he might have won a free election in the South in 1956. Antiwar critics years later said that the South Vietnam regime was inherently illegitimate because it did not abide by the election clause in the Accords. These critics said that since Ho Chi Minh “might” have won a hypothetical free election, therefore he represented true democracy. What the critics missed was that these hypothetical free elections were quite impossible in 1954, or 1956 or any other time, because the Communists would never permit free campaigning against Communism. Ho's DRV was totally controlled by Communist cadres which systematically tracked down and imprisoned or executed all its critics, village by village, street by street. In 1956 instead of holding an election in the North, Ho used his army to suppress peasants who protested "land reform"; thousands were shot. Allowing genuine opposition parties to solicit votes--and then yielding power to them if they won a majority--was totally incompatible with its precepts. The DRV never intended to hold free elections in 1956, and never before or since has held any.

Promoting the Diem Regime, 1954-63

The United States rejected the Geneva Accords as a violation of the principles of self determination and containment. It worked to build up the new, independent nation of South Vietnam (SVN), by funding local and national economic and administrative infrastructures. In July 1954 Ngo Dinh Diem became premier in Saigon. Diem and his powerful brothers were outstanding nationalists who were both anti-French and anticommunist. As leaders of the well educated Catholic minority, they won considerable sympathy and support in the Catholic anticommunist circles in the US, notably from Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York and the Kennedy family. As soon as the Communists came to power in the North, some 800,000 refugees (mostly Catholic) fled to South Vietnam. They provided most of the leadership and support for its government (GVN) and its army (ARVN). American financial aid and military advisors replaced the French, and SVN under Diem took its place among the world's newly independent nations. North and South Vietnam had approximately equal populations of about 16-18 million in the 1960s; the US had 200 million.

The Eisenhower Administration, eager to formalize the containment system by treaty, in 1954 set up the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). The US promised to aid SEATO signatories that were attacked by a Communist power. The French (still committed to the Geneva Accords) vetoed membership for SVN. To get around this French veto, Washington had inserted in the Treaty a vague protocol that seemed to give Saigon some sort of guarantee, even though it was not allowed to sign the Treaty or become part of SEATO. Furthermore, Eisenhower decided not to sign a mutual defense treaty with SVN in order to avoid over-commitment. Instead the US relied on the highly ambiguous SEATO Treaty, which was ratified by the Senate with little discussion of Vietnam. By default it became the chief legal base for US involvement in Vietnam.

In 1960, Eisenhower had 900 American advisors in SVN to bring its army up to world standards. That same year Hanoi's ruling Politburo established the "National Liberation Front" (NLF) as its political arm in the South, and the "Viet Cong" as the military arm. The rank and file were southerners, the leadership was northern. The Viet Cong tactics were based on guerrilla strikes that would assassinate local officials and village leaders favorable to Saigon, occasionally attack an isolated ARVN detachment, and when needed seize ("tax") village food stocks or kidnap ("draft") young men. The Communist goal was "liberation" of the South from capitalism and westernism. The NLF had a few shadow formations in the cities, where it did poorly; Washington was baffled why it did so well in the countryside. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told President John Kennedy in 1961 it was "absurd to think that a nation of 20 million people can be subverted by 15-20 thousand active guerrillas if the government and the people of that country do not wish to be subverted."

Washington always insisted that aggression was organized and directed by Hanoi; it rejected arguments by antiwar doves that Hanoi was innocent--that the conflict was merely a civil war entirely operated from indigenous southern rebels. The doves argued since it was really only a civil war, therefore global Communist expansion was “not” happening in Vietnam; hence containment policy did not apply. Most Doves were fatalists--they felt the U.S. was trying to resist profound social forces that made a NLF victory inevitable. Note that the Tet Offensive in 1968 drastically weakened the NLF, and vigorous SVN attacks had reduced it to a hollow shell by 1970. The conflict after Tet was between Hanoi and Saigon. After the North captured Saigon in 1975, Hanoi's leaders had no further use for their puppets. The NLF and Viet Cong immediately vanished, and Hanoi took full direct control.

Weaknesses of South Vietnam

Just as Diem's government (GVN) was factionalized and inefficient, its army, the ARVN, was a typical third world operation based on patronage, favoritism, and corruption. Commands and promotions went to political insiders, regardless of their competence or (more often) incompetence. Food, uniforms, munitions and information were sold for cash. Intrigue was the game, and the generals usually spent most of their time on politics rather than command. Few senior officers had any real military training. Draftees did not want to fight any more than their officers did. Although hardware was abundant and of good quality, training was mediocre, food and pay were unattractive, and morale was poor. Desertion rates were high (home was nearby); this hardly upset the officers because they kept the absent soldiers on the rolls and pocketed their paychecks. Diem (and his successors) were primarily interested in using the ARVN as a device to secure power, rather than as a tool to unify the nation and defeat its enemies. Despite monumental American efforts from 1960 through 1972, the situation never decisively improved. Saigon would ultimately lose the war because its large and very well equipped army lacked spirit, motivation and patriotism. The enemy on the other hand, fine tuned its military forces into a powerful political instrument.

Viet Cong guerrillas and regular North Vietnam Army

In the Viet Cong, and in the North Vietnam regular army (PAVN), every unit down to the company level had a cadre of political officers who monitored ideological correctness on a daily basis. Insubordination was impossible. The Viet Cong had many unwilling draftees of its own; tens of thousands deserted to the government, which promised them protection. The Viet Cong executed deserters if it could, and threatened their families, all the while closely monitoring the ranks for any sign of defeatism or deviation from the party line.

U.S. involvement

Kennedy's Containment Policy

The Kennedy Administration came to power in 1961 committed to containing Communist expansion (whether Russian, Chinese, Cuban or Vietnamese), to demonstrating the will of America to be number one in the world, to upgrading the mission of the Army, to defeating Communist-led wars of liberation, and to helping South Vietnam survive. It was opposed to rollback because war with Moscow would be catastrophic. As a senator, Kennedy had empathized with the fate of his fellow Catholics in Vietnam. As President, however, he showed less empathy with the sufferings in Vietnam and more concern with containment of Moscow and Peking. Kennedy was impatient with Eisenhower's cutbacks in the defense budget, his many legalistic treaties, and his threats of massive nuclear retaliation in case Russia took the initiative in going to war. Kennedy lived in a constant swirl of activity and sought proactive foreign policy. Kennedy agreed with General Maxwell Taylor, an outspoken critic of massive retaliation, that the Army could be used as a precision instrument of foreign policy. They both believed that a "flexible response" could win guerrilla wars (sometimes called "low intensity conflict"). The challenge to containment was not so much a full-scale Soviet invasion of western Europe, but a slice-by-slice subversion of small countries. Kennedy (and other liberals) believed poverty caused people to accept Communism. The antidote was American money, technology and advice to promote economic modernization and nation-building, coupled with military protection during the vital early stages. Trumpeting the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 as a personal triumph, and armed with a new military doctrine that seemed well-tailored to the situation, Kennedy moved confidently into Southeast Asia. Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, meanwhile was reliving the Korean war (when he had been in charge of the East Asian desk); he repeatedly warned of the specter of Red China conquering the rest of Asia. Rusk considered Hanoi to be Peking's puppet, despite the long- standing animosity between the Vietnamese and the Chinese. He paid little attention to the "Cultural Revolution" which from 1966 to 1971 ripped China apart and paralyzed its military capability. Although China eventually sent 50,000 air defense soldiers to help protect Hanoi, it lacked the military capability and the unified leadership necessary to counter an American invasion of North Vietnam.

Fear of china

Rusk worried that a Communist victory in Vietnam would cause neighboring countries to fall like dominoes to pro-Chinese Communists. The threat was greatest in Indonesia, an island nation with a large population, significant oil wealth, and an active Communist movement. In 1965, however, the anti-communist army seized power and totally destroyed the Communist movement in Indonesia with wholesale arrests and executions. (The US and the CIA was not significantly involved in this.) The "falling domino" threat was greatest in Laos, where a low-intensity civil war gave the Communist Pathet Lao control of much of that remote land. Hanoi made systematic use of Laotian and Cambodian jungle trails as supply routes to the Viet Cong--the infamous "Ho Chi Minh Trail."

Escalation by Viet Cong

In the early 1960s the Viet Cong escalated its attacks; the Diem regime lost ground every month. In 1961 the Viet Cong had 25,000 regular soldiers and 17,000 underground operatives. The NLF controlled villages containing about a fifth of the rural population of ten million (six million people lived in SVN's cities and towns, where the NLF remained weak.) American observers reported that the Saigon regime lacked legitimacy in the villages. The GVN never generated spontaneous support or a sense of patriotism because it was too much like the French system: too autocratic, too urban, Catholic, aloof, corrupt, arrogant, inefficient, self-indulgent and predatory. The challenge was not to restore legitimacy but get it in the first place. By contrast, peasants at first found the NLF appeared to be honest, caring and basically like themselves. It had considerable support--it especially appealed to idealistic youth, and in any case was always feared by the villagers who knew the assassination squads would eliminate any dissent. From 1957 through 1972, the Viet Cong Security Service carried out 37,000 assassinations of government officials, religious and civic leaders, teachers, informers, landowners, and moneylenders. The only effective government response was to hunt the guerrillas down, or target their leaders, but that was too dangerous for the dispirited ARVN. Instead Diem's defensive strategy was the "strategic hamlet" program. Millions of villagers were relocated into new hamlets that the ARVN and local militia forces could defend. The villagers resented the dislocation and the central government's replacement of local leaders. By October, 1963, Kennedy had sent 16,000 advisors who were working feverishly to shape up the ARVN; 100 had already been killed. The U.S. Air Force began training pilots; the Army sent in helicopter transports. The choppers terrorized the Viet Cong, until they figured out how to ambush them when they landed. After 9,000 combat sorties, 21 airplanes and 13 helicopters had been shot down. Viet Cong influence had been pushed back, but the NLF still controlled a tenth of the rural villages.

Weak Diem regime

The biggest problem was the Diem regime itself-- militarily ineffective and politically unpopular. It tried to suppress the non-Communist opposition by large-scale arrests. Its downfall came when it bungled the demands of organized Buddhist monks for a larger voice in political affairs. The multiple interest groups and centers of power in the nation had become alienated from Diem, and gave him no support as he raided the pagodas and arrested demonstrators. Furthermore, he increasingly rejected American demands for political and economic reforms. Washington sadly concluded that Diem had outlived his usefulness, so it stood silent during a military coup on November 1, 1963, that assassinated Diem and installed the first of a long series of unstable governments. Kennedy himself was assassinated three weeks later, and Lyndon Johnson took charge. Diem's death led to chaos; the strategic hamlet program collapsed, and the Viet Cong recouped their losses and pressed forward across the countryside. ARVN battalions one after another crumbled under intense local attacks. The CIA gave GVN only an "even chance" of surviving.

Lyndon Johnson's War, 1963-65

Johnson would have to do something unless he wanted to be known as the Democrat who "lost Vietnam." As a believer in the "domino theory," he worried that other countries in Southeast would fall to Communism if the line was not held. The only alternative to containment, he believed, was rollback as advocated by Barry Goldwater. "Why Not Victory?" Goldwater asked; because it means nuclear war, Johnson retorted, as he used the rollback issue to overwhelm Goldwater in the 1964 election. (Whereupon the Air Force revised its manual of air doctrine, to state that "total victory in some situations would be an unreasonable goal."

Domestic politics

Equally important to Johnson than what happened in Asia was what was happening at home, especially in the minds of the voters. Vietnam was a "political war" because the President always put domestic politics first. Having been a Democratic Senate leader in the early 1950s who had to defend against Republican charges that the Democrats had "lost" China and failed in Korea, Johnson was determined that a similar political disaster had to be avoided at all costs. "I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went," he vowed. He tried several different strategies, but running through them all was a policy of controlling popular perceptions. In plain words, deception. The American people were never to become alarmed at the magnitude of the problem; White House policy was to keep reassuring the nation that everything was going fine in Vietnam, and that LBJ could be trusted to handle the situation in his own way. This was the only war in American history in which Washington did not try to rouse patriotic fervor behind the cause; indeed, Johnson tried to subdue any spontaneous outpourings of patriotism. The reason was that a surge of patriotism would lead to demands for victory and rollback--Goldwaterism--and risk nuclear destruction from Russian missiles. Even if the nation escaped nuclear war, a frenzy of pro-war patriotism would doom funding for Johnson's domestic programs, known as "The Great Society".

On the other hand, allowing the Communists to take over a free country was unacceptable. "The central lesson of our time," Johnson told a John Hopkins audience in April 1965, "is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next." He continued, We must say in southeast Asia--as we did in Europe--in the words of the Bible: 'Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.'" Privately he felt that if he lost Vietnam to the communists, everything he wanted to work for at home--civil rights, the War on Poverty, and his Great Society--would also be lost. "I'd be giving a big fat reward to aggression," he explained years later, and "there would follow in this country an endless national debate--a mean and destructive debate--that would shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy."

Johnson's plan to settle war

Johnson did have a plan for settling the conflict, one that conformed to containment policy, and to New Deal liberalism. Johnson believed that all disputes arose out of mutual misunderstandings, and could be resolved through negotiation. His strategy was to offer Hanoi billions of dollars in foreign aid if they would play along, or else bomb them into negotiations, from which a permanent peace would result that allowed South Vietnam to continue as an independent nation. Johnson did not reject the possibility that the Communists could become part of some sort of coalition government. The Pentagon, which saw its mission in terms of winning wars, not facilitators for negotiations, never agreed with Johnson. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s the generals repeatedly warned that Vietnam was probably a losing cause and they advised against intervention. The President responded by picking new generals who would play along, and by closely monitored them to make sure that he would never encounter another Douglas MacArthur. The result was yes-men who deferred to the White House and to the all-powerful Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara; no matter how wrong the brass thought Johnson was, they would never resign in protest.

Congress

With the Pentagon under control, Johnson next froze Congress out of the policy making process. He ignored antiwar "doves" like Senator William Fulbright, the chair of the impotent Foreign Relations Committee. More of a political threat were "hawks" like GOP Senator Barry Goldwater, articulate spokesman for the nascent conservative movement, and Democratic Senator John Stennis, the chair of the powerful Armed Services Committee. Johnson feared that if Congress had a voice it would push for a more aggressive, expensive war that would sabotage his high- spending low-tax "Great Society" domestic program. War taxes would be politically disastrous in the next election. Even worse, Congress might reject his forced-negotiations strategy and insist upon a roll-back strategy aiming at the defeat and conquest of North Vietnam.* The surest lesson Johnson and the liberals had learned in Korea was that MacArthur's roll-back strategy had led to Chinese intervention and humiliation. Under no circumstances would they accept a roll-back policy.

Containment had to work. Johnson therefore refused to pull out. The South Vietnamese clearly were unable to save themselves with just American advice; Johnson made the fateful decision to rescue them with US combat troops. He planned to first rescue GVN (Government of South Vietnam) from imminent collapse by guerrilla attacks, then negotiate a settlement with Hanoi that would allow it to survive. He vetoed two other options: US command and control of the ARVN (unwise because GVN would never learn to defend itself) and invasion of North Vietnam to strike the threat at its source. In mid-1964, LBJ assembled a new team. Looking for a yes-man, he passed over 43 more senior generals to promote Harold Johnson to Chief of Staff of the Army. Maxwell Taylor left the chairmanship of the JCS to became ambassador, with authority over all diplomatic, CIA and military operations in Vietnam. General Earle Wheeler replaced Taylor at JCS; his mission was to keep the senior commanders loyal to the White House. General William Westmoreland became head of MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam), with authority over US Army and Marine ground operations, and some naval and tactical air operations. He was one of the few senior officers since 1940 not to have attended the military's internal school system, especially the command and general staff college and the various war colleges. However he had studied at Harvard Business School, and his freedom from standard doctrine and his interest in quantification attracted him to McNamara. Admiral Ulysses Sharp at Pearl Harbor, became head of all US forces in the Pacific. He had charge of the naval blockade that kept Hanoi from running supplies by sea, and most importantly, of strategic bombing operations over North Vietnam (which were launched from Sharp's four aircraft carriers or from Air Force B-52 bases in Thailand and Guam). Nominally Westmoreland reported to Taylor, Sharp, Harold Johnson and Wheeler; in practice he dealt directly with McNamara or LBJ. Westmoreland could always be counted upon for a public statement exuding optimism; he reassured LBJ that the war would be won in time for the 1968 elections. The intricate division of responsibility was set up so that there would be no powerful theater commander like MacArthur; it also guaranteed a steady flow of disputes that could only be resolved by McNamara or the President. The military thus never had control of the war it was called upon to fight, or of the tactics to use.

Gulf of Tonkin incident: 1964

In early August 1964 Johnson seized on an ambiguous incident in which North Vietnamese PT boats reportedly fired on a US destroyer. The reports probably were a product of combat hysteria among inexperienced American sailors. However, the North Vietnamese had indeed sunk an American ship in May, and had begun to kill American advisors; they were clearly testing Washington. He immediately rammed the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution" through Congress, saying it would deter Hanoi. The Resolution was itself vague, endorsing the Commander-in-Chief's right to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack...and to prevent further aggression." Not only did the Resolution give Johnson a boost during his heated 1964 reelection campaign, it also provided just enough legality for him to avoid going back to Congress. In the election Johnson battled Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, warning vehemently that Goldwater's "Why Not Victory" rollback strategy would produce a nuclear war with the Soviets. Surprisingly little discussion of Vietnam took place. Virtually all the information and advice that reached Johnson and McNamara in 1963-65 was deeply pessimistic: the consensus was that the South Vietnam government was too corrupt, and its army was too inefficient, to withstand the Communists. The only chance for containment--a slim one--was to have American soldiers take command of the war and defeat the Viet Cong forces on the ground, while hurting North Vietnam just enough to convince them to negotiate.

Escalation 1965

Immediately after his triumphant landslide, Johnson made his move. The NLF was on the verge of announcing a provisional government in the northernmost six provinces; three elite regiments from the North Vietnamese Main Force moved into South Vietnam. Hanoi thought it could win quickly and that America was a paper tiger. It was a tragic miscalculation that would bring endless misery to the Vietnamese. Johnson sent in the first American combat troops in March, 1965, to protect the air bases. Rejecting the Air Force's strategy of strategic bombing against 94 critical targets in the North, Johnson and McNamara instead launched an alternative air power strategy called "Rolling Thunder." It entailed retailiation bombing anytime Communists struck at American forces, together with a gradual buildup of 22 bombing attacks against small military targets in the North. There was to be no bombing of cities or villages, and no attacks on the ships brining Russian and Chinese arms to the port of Haiphong. To reverse the downhill slide in the villages, Westmoreland called for 24 more maneuver battalions (of 5400 men each) added to the 20 he had, plus more artillery, aviation (helicopters), and support units; McNamara rounded the total to 175,000 troops, with 27 more maneuver battalions to come in 1966. Westmoreland's strategy was to hunt down and attack enemy infantry formations. He rejected the Marine Corps alternative program of building up a close rapport with the peasant and defending their villages. McNamara realized that Westmoreland's search and destroy plan would be costly, with perhaps 500 Americans killed every month. Washington having explicitly rejected rollback and victory had a goal of containment that would allow South Vietnam to continue to exist as a non-Communist state.

Antiwar movement

While Washington tried to keep the war quiet, radical college students in the US launched a noisy antiwar protest movement with teach-ins and rallies.* Their efforts were counterproductive, because they forced millions of Americans who might have had doubts about the war to support the Administration for patriotic reasons.

The antiwar credo focused on the illegality and immorality of American action, and praised the heroic peasants fighting western imperialism. Much was made of napalm and forced resettlement, to create a sense of American guilt rather than reflect empathy with the Vietnamese. After the war, protesters maintained the guilt theme, but forgot about the Vietnamese. Senator Fulbright, the most prominent dove, lacked empathy with the Vietnamese. As a believer in white supremacy, he believed white Americans should not die to save an inferior colored race. The most promenint military "dove" was retired Marine Corps Commandant David Shoup. He argued in 1967 that Americans should ignore the issue of freedom in Asia because, "I don't think the whoile of Southeast Asia, as related to the present and future safety and freedom of the people of this country, is worth the life and limb of a single American." The Vietnamese, he added, "have no idea of our meaning of freedom." Until Tet in early 1968, the clear majority of Americans (including students) took a "hawkish" stance on the war.

By the end of 1965 there were 184,000 Americans inside Vietnam, plus 22,400 Allies (from Korean, Australian and New Zealand). A top Pentagon strategist figured that the relative importance of American objectives in Vietnam:

• 70% to avoid humiliating defeat
• 20% to keep SVN and neighbors from Chinese hands
• 10% to permit the people of SVN to "enjoy a better, freer way of life"

Having quietly become so deeply involved, national honor and prestige meant the US could no longer easily back out; the war had become a quagmire.

Bibliography

• Anderson, David L. Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War (2004).
• Berman, Larry. Lyndon Johnson's War: The Road to Stalemate (1991). online edition
• Blackwell, Amy et al. A Companion to the Vietnam War (2002) excerpt and text search
• Freedman, Lawrence. Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (2000) excerpt and text search
• Herring, George C. America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (4th ed 2001), most widely used short history.
• Hillstrom, Kevin, and Laurie Collier Hillstrom. The Vietnam Experience: A Concise Encyclopedia of American Literature, Songs, and Films (1998) excerpt and text search
• Kahin, George McTurnan. Intervention: how America became involved in Vietnam (1986) online at ACLS e-books
• Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History (1983), popular history by journalist; strong on Saigon's plans. excerpt and text search
• Kutler, Stanley ed. Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (1996). essays by experts
• Lewy, Guenter. America in Vietnam (1978), defends U.S. actions.
• McMahon, Robert J. Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War: Documents and Essays (1995) textbook.
• Schulzinger, Robert D. Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975. (1997) online edition
• Spector, Ronald H. Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941-1960 (2005)
• Spector, Ronald H. After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam (1994) excerpt and text search
• Tucker, Spencer. ed. Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (1998) 3 vol. reference set; also one-volume abridgement (2001).
• Tucker, Spencer. Vietnam. (1999) 226pp. online edition
• Wiest, Andrew. The Vietnam War, 1956-1975 Routledge. 2003. 95pp online edition

Primary sources

• The Pentagon Papers (Gravel ed. 5 vol 1971); combination of narrative and secret documents compiled by Pentagon. excerpts

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