 In this lecture, we're going to talk about the international consequences of the Vietnam era, both for the United States as well as other countries around the world. In our last two lectures, we talked about the Civil Rights Movement. We talked about this important change that happens in American society during the 1950s and 1960s. Well, the Vietnam War is another important force within both American society and America's international relations with other nations during the 1960s, and so these two lectures will somewhat complement each other. In this lecture and in the following lecture, we're going to talk about two different aspects of the war. In this lecture, we're going to focus on the war itself and on its international impact, and in the following lecture, we'll talk more about the war's impact on the United States, on American society and American domestic issues. The war, in order to understand the Vietnam War, we really need to understand how the war fit into U.S. Cold War ideology. So important to understand that the war was part of a broader U.S. strategy of containment. This idea that diplomat George Kennan had pioneered in the 1940s, late 1940s, that in order to prevent the Soviet Union from being a powerful nation, it was necessary to contain the spread of communism, prevent communism from influencing other countries around the world, and the U.S. commits itself to isolating the Soviet Union and containing the spread of communism around the globe. In order to understand the war, it's also important to understand why there was a war in the first place, why Vietnam, why this small nation in Southeast Asia, what was going on there that the U.S. felt was important enough to send military troops and fight for. We're going to talk a little bit about Vietnamese culture, Vietnamese society, and ultimately why the war was necessary, why there was a conflict here in the first place. And we'll finally conclude by talking about the cost of the conflict, both in lost lives as well as the financial implications of the war for the United States and why this is a big deal, why it really matters. Well, as I said a moment ago, containment is a very important part of why the United States eventually gets involved in a war in Southeast Asia, in the nation here of Vietnam, that borders on the South China Sea, that borders on China, and then Thailand, Burma, or Myanmar here to the West, and as well as Laos and Cambodia. So why this region in general? Well, part of this is that this broader idea was this containment policy was part of a broader notion of the Domino Theory. The Domino Theory being an idea that is part of this broader kind of Cold War ideology that said if one country collapses a communism, then pretty soon its neighboring countries will collapse the communism, and then pretty soon other countries, and as a row of, just like a row of dominoes falls, pretty soon all the rest of the world will collapse. The idea in Vietnam of that, China had already collapsed the communism, and the fear was that they were going to export communism to all of Vietnam, eventually all of Southeast Asia, and then pretty soon all of Asia would be under communist control, and this was one of these notions that helped bring about US interest and US concern in Vietnam. One of the things that is part of this conflict is that there's a lot of misunderstanding between American ideas about why a war is necessary and Vietnamese culture, and we're going to talk a little bit about sort of the important differences between these. American leaders had a very Western perspective. That containment was a tool that could be used to prevent ideas and influence of communism from spreading, and they assumed in many respects that communism was something that was bad, that was foreign to Vietnam, and that was an external force being imposed by the Chinese that were trying to influence Vietnam to become a communist nation. What they really didn't understand though is that within Vietnam itself, the Vietnamese people didn't really see things that way, they didn't necessarily see communism as this foreign force, this foreign ideology being imposed on them by the Chinese, they didn't necessarily see that once they became communist, if that would happen, they would necessarily want to quote-unquote export communism to all their surrounding neighboring countries, so the idea that US had versus the idea that the Vietnamese people themselves had was a source of of course misunderstanding, was a source of tension, and ultimately was a source of a lot of the problems within the war itself. Another aspect is that Americans tended to have a very black and white view on communism. You were either capitalist or you were communist, and there was really no shade of gray in the middle, and as a result that sort of kind of black and white ideology really didn't do a good job in dealing with nations in Asia where communism didn't quite look like Soviet style communism, where communism might be more about land reform, might be more about taking land from rich landowners and providing it to poor peasants who had no opportunity for land, and for poor peasants that had a certain appeal, who wanted more land in order to raise crops, and resented these rich landowners who controlled all the land. So there was a certain appeal within there that had nothing to do with the sort of strict ideology of industrial communism as the Soviets saw it, and had more to do with basic ideas of land ownership and land reform and things like that. So there were some major shades of gray that American policy makers and American military leaders didn't understand that were going on in Vietnam at the time. Vietnamese culture, support and understand Vietnamese culture in order to sort of understand the broader work, was largely influenced by Chinese culture and was influenced by Confucianism, which was a notion that develops in China, which is a power is being a reward for virtue, and those who were virtuous will gradually advance through society to become important leaders. It also emphasized family loyalty, family piety, in other words, being loyal and responsible to your family. Another aspect of this is that land is very important, that it's very important to respect the land on which one lives. It helps provide a family with their identity, and in Vietnam, which was a largely land poor society, the little bit of land that you owned or that you controlled was extremely important because you probably had had that land for generations. Your parents and your grandparents in many generations were probably buried on that land. So land was important to Vietnamese within the broader cultural system, and the ideas of the set of Confucianism of power is a reward for virtue, as loyalty to your family is being extremely important, whether in parts of Vietnamese society, and Americans tended not to understand that. The leader of North Vietnam, we'll talk a little bit more about how North Vietnam comes about, who was the communist named Ho Chi Minh, functioned within this broader Confucian society and understood it and knew how to use it to influence those around him, and was able to really present this struggle as largely a homegrown movement, that this wasn't Vietnamese, Vietnam and communism. This wasn't something the Chinese were trying to impose on the Vietnamese. This was largely something the Vietnamese wanted for themselves. As a result of this, Americans just didn't understand these distinctions, these shades of gray, and the American leader side is the evil North is under Chinese influence, is trying to spread communism to the south of Vietnam, and the only way to do this is to essentially try to prevent that from happening, whether through military force or some other kinds of things. So American leaders really just didn't understand some of the broader things that were happening in Vietnam during this period, that this wasn't just about communism, this was about land reform. This was about a broader internal struggle within Vietnamese society. Now again, to give you just a little bit of background on Vietnam itself, that Vietnam is part of Indochina, as we said. It's part of this region made up of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Vietnam had been colonized by the French in the 1860s, beginning in 1860, as part of French efforts to establish colonies in Asia. And this colonization of the French creates a very interesting society influenced both by Confucianism and as well as Catholic ideal, as the French bring Catholic in. So it's a very kind of mixed region. Now the French hang on to Vietnam until World War II, when the Japanese invade and drive out any French forces in Vietnam and essentially occupy the region. And it's kind of nominally under French control, but really the Japanese are the ones who are in charge. Now during the war, there were a source of Vietnamese who opposed the Japanese and the US government makes great efforts to work with them to fight against the Japanese as well as sort of the nominal French Vichy government that was controlling Vietnam. And so one of these nationalists that the US supported was a guy by the name of Ho Chi Minh. And Ho Chi Minh had been a nationalist, had been arguing against colonization, had been arguing in favor of Vietnamese independence well before World War II and far back as World War I in many respects. So he gets support from the US government to fight the Japanese during the war. And one of the ways the US does this is by giving him a certain amount of promise that they'll allow Vietnam to become an independent country when the war ends. Well once the war ends and the Vietnamese forces are very successful in driving out the Japanese, once the war ends the US renegs on its promise. And because of circumstances in Europe, the US decides that it's better to support the French than it is to make the French angry by trying to force them to give up Vietnam and let Vietnam become independent. So the French come back into Vietnam with their military forces and the Vietnamese of course are very upset about this betrayal and they launch a guerrilla war for independence. And so for four years the Vietnam, where the Vietnamese kind of independence fighters, the Vietnam combat French regular army troops in Vietnam and ultimately bring about a major battle in 1954 in the northern part of Vietnam at a place called Diem Bien Phu. And at this battle of Diem Bien Phu they defeat the French army and force the French to negotiate a settlement to end the war. And as part of this settlement Vietnam is divided down the 17th parallel. And so as a result the northern part becomes north Vietnam, the southern part becomes south Vietnam. The idea is not that this will be permanent. There's more about a way of helping to sort of separate the country in order to allow for elections to take place and eventually a reunification. Well what ends up happening is that the northern part becomes a communist state. Ho Chi Minh becomes the communist leader. Southern part becomes a semi-democratic state. Not really truly democratic because there were some very questionable election policies. But the idea is sort of democratic. Nominally there was an emperor here named Bao Dai who was still in charge of South Vietnam but reality was that he had very little influence over the region. And in beginning in 1954 when Vietnam becomes separated, Americans begin to step in and replace the French as advisors, as providing military and economic support for the South as helping the South Vietnamese train their military and try to prevent any influences from the communist north. Well shortly after independence there's a referendum that takes place for who's going to be the new leader of South Vietnam. And a Catholic native born South Vietnamese named No Dinh Dien pictured here. He kind of rigs the election and wins the referendum and becomes the new president of the Republic of South Vietnam. Well, the North sees this as a very shady election. Many within South Vietnam itself see this as a shady election. And as a result, in the South, we see that after 1954, the formation of the Viet Cong guerrilla movement could have the children in some respects of the Viet Minh guerrilla soldiers of the first half of the 1950. And the Viet Cong began to be a part of the broader National Liberation Front, which is the name that they take to help liberate the South from Diem. Diem was wealthy, he was Catholic, he was not particularly popular in many parts of the South and so it wasn't particularly difficult for the Viet Cong to attract a lot of support in the countryside from the poor peasants who were very resentful of the rich landowners like No Dinh Diem. So the NLF or the Viet Cong are very successful in recruiting. And they're also perfectly willing to use violence and force if necessary to help change hearts and minds and can bring people over to their side. So there certainly is a lot of violence, but at the same time, there are a lot of South Vietnamese peasants who are willing to go over because they like what the Vietnamese communists have to offer, which is land, which is more sort of independent to not being dependent on these wealthy landowners for their existence. And so as a result, this guerrilla movement gained strength, this communist guerrilla movement gained strength in the countryside. And American advisors began to become very concerned because they can see that Diem is losing a lot of his support and they're afraid that South Vietnam will collapse. So beginning in 1961 and continuing through 1964, John F. Kennedy, the president until the end of 1963, sends in U.S. special forces to advise and train Republic of Vietnamese soldiers, the army of the Republic of Vietnam, and help them resist efforts by here the Viet Cong to take over the South. This is one of the ways where we talked about cultural misunderstandings. Americans come in and they make a lot of bad choices. One of the first things they do is they create what they call strategic hamlets. In other words, peasants are rounded up, forced off their land and put into concentration camps, but perhaps slightly nicer than that. What all this does is it makes the peasants angry because as we said, the peasants value their land and that's where their ancestors are buried. That's what really matters to them. And they're put in these concentration camps that are not very pleasant, that are dangerous, that are dirty, and actually provide a perfect breeding ground for the Viet Cong to come in and win hearts and minds because the whole point of these hamlets is that they're supposed to protect peasants from influence by the Viet Cong, but the Viet Cong just infiltrate them and use them as a perfect recruiting ground for people to join the movement. So the strategic hamlet program is a complete failure and pretty soon, the DM has lost pretty much all of the countryside and the only support he has left are in the cities. He also manages to offend another large minority within Vietnam, the Buddhists, by some of his policies. So pretty soon, DM is in trouble and refusing at some point to listen to American advice. Ultimately, the Kennedy administration decides DM has to go and with the help of the CIA, their coup is engineered and eventually DM is removed from power and killed by military leaders who take over. And in fact, this happens just a short time before President John F. Kennedy's assassination in November of 1968. So when Kennedy is assassinated in 1963, in November of 1963, so when Kennedy is assassinated in 1963, there are about 17,000 American advisors in South Vietnam. And President Lyndon Johnson, who inherits the war from Kennedy, you know, Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy's vice president who becomes president, has to figure out what to do about this. Lyndon Johnson, pictured here on the right, was very fearful of looking weak on Vietnam. He always felt that he was strong on communism, he was strong fighting against communism, didn't want to look like the U.S. was going to cut and run and abandon its commitments to people in Asia. He also inherited much of Kennedy's political staff and military staff, who were very strongly in favor of Vietnam, U.S. involvement. So Johnson decides to go ahead and continue supporting essentially American activities in South Vietnam. And this continues until August of 1964, when an incident that later proves to be largely made up, the North Vietnamese gun bullets supposedly attack an American destroyer here in the Gulf of Tonkin that was international waters. And Johnson and his advisors use this as a justification for the United States to essentially begin a outright military action in South Vietnam. This becomes known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that Congress passes giving, basically giving Johnson a blank check to begin military activities concentrated against the North in terms of bombing and to land U.S. troops on the ground in the South to fight the war, because the conclusion was that the army of South Vietnam forces just couldn't cut it. They weren't good enough to fight this war. And so what begins as a result of this is a huge military buildup of the United States in Vietnam. The begin a three-year bombing campaign, both with heavy bombers here like this B-52, as well as smaller lighter bombers to try to absolutely destroy the infrastructure of the North, U.S. troops go on the ground and begin to attack against the Vietnamese communists in South Vietnam. And this begins as broader strategy of attempting to control and pacify the South and utterly destroy the North. This policy of the war is very questionable because what happens is that rather than using regular U.S. army troops who are needed for the Cold War, essentially to be stationed in Europe, and rather than using army reserve or National Guard troops, the effort is made to use the draft. And the draft had been part of the United States military policy since the late 40s. But the draft essentially to draw up your people, give them training, send them to Vietnam for a year, and then they would be done. And so rather than using regular army troops to fight the war, the effort is made essentially to use draughties to fight the war. And this becomes a great source of controversy within the United States. The war itself proves to be extremely controversial, both how it's fought and of course the reaction in the United States. And we'll talk more in the next lecture about the reaction. But the war largely becomes about a policy of body counts. Because unlike a traditional war, the U.S. wasn't going to invade the North. That was seen as going too far. So the U.S. would bomb the North, but the U.S. wasn't going to invade and try to take over the North. So the only way to really count progress was to see how many Vietnamese Communists, VCs, were killed, how many of these Viet Cong were killed during this war. And the idea was that if we kill enough Vietnamese Communists, well, then we'll win the war. And many people predicted, oh, this'll be a pretty short conflict, probably went within a couple years. By 67 or 68, the war will be over. Well, using body counts proves to be a very erroneous way of doing things, because as it turns out, it's hard to count bodies after a battle. The Vietnamese Communists are very good about collecting their dead. And so U.S. troops go around and they try to count the number of bodies and they get certain numbers. Those who are at the next level say, well, those numbers are probably too small. Now, it's probably was actually, instead of maybe 10 people killed, it's probably more like 20 people. And then those numbers go up to the next level and pretty soon the generals look at them and they say, well, no, that's probably wrong. It's probably more like 100 people. So pretty soon by the time it gets back to DC, to the president, the battle is, oh, four or 500 Vietnamese Communists were killed in this engagement. When the reality is it maybe was, five or six, maybe 10. So these body counts give all sorts of bizarre numbers. And as a result of it, it leads to a very flawed understanding of the war and how the U.S. is doing in fighting the conflict. And the U.S. leaders, both military and civilian keep saying, we're winning the war, we're killing all these Vietnamese Communists, everything is looking good. And the American public believes them because they have no reason not to. But the tide in public opinion begins to shift in 1968. Because during the January of 1968, Vietnamese Communists launch a major offensive against the U.S. forces. It's the so-called Tet Offensive. Tet is Chinese New Year's and the Vietnamese celebrate Chinese New Year's as well. And beginning on January 31, 1968, the South Vietnamese guerrillas launched this massive assault on the cities of the North and capture a number of the cities. And also really for a few days, stretch the U.S. ability, U.S. soldiers ability to defend themselves. Ultimately, the U.S. troops fight back. They really almost wipe out much of the Vietnamese, much of the VC forces. But Tet is a huge public relations victory for the Communists and a huge public relations disaster for the United States military and civilian leadership. Because it shows the American public that this war is far from being won. That in fact, the war is gonna probably go on for much longer. And as a result, President Lyndon Johnson announces soon thereafter that he's not going to run for reelection in 1968. And Americans begin to take a much more skeptical attitude of the war, especially because this war was unlike any war the U.S. had ever fought before. Because we didn't know, there were no front lines. We didn't know who the enemies were. These peasants who might be working in their fields one minute could pick up a AK-47 and shoot at U.S. troops the next minute. So it was just a confusing and hard to understand conflict for both those who were in Vietnam as well as for American civilians who were listening to the war on the nightly news and trying to understand what was going on. The 68 election results in Republican President Richard Nixon's election as president. And Nixon comes into office promising a clear strategy for disengagement in Vietnam, getting the U.S. out of the war. And talks about this strategy as being Vietnamization as he calls it. Idea of Vietnamization was to return the war from being something that American troops were doing to being something that Vietnamese, South Vietnamese troops were going to fight. And part of this Vietnamization strategy was to try to do as much as possible to defeat and destroy the North. And so early in 1970, Nixon, secretly initially without telling American, you know, the United States, American public about this launches an invasion into neighboring Cambodia, a sovereign country that the U.S. was not at war with in order to capture and destroy military supplies that were building up on the border between Cambodia and South Vietnam, the Vietnamese communist forces have been smuggling down into the region. And this is sets of a firestorm of protests in the United States. Well, Nixon claims it's a very successful strategy. It is a public relations disaster. Over the next few years, Nixon and his advisors begin a process of attempting to negotiate a peace settlement in Vietnam, with both the North Vietnamese, with the Chinese, and with the South Vietnamese. And this proves into a very complicated process. And finally in 1973, an agreement is reached to in the war, to essentially force the South Vietnamese to be independent and take care of themselves, to force the North to leave the South alone and not try to invade it and to allow the U.S. to pull out all troops. As a result, after 73, the U.S. withdraws all of its forces, military forces leave some civilian advisors behind and leaves lots of equipment and supplies behind to help the South defend itself. Well, the South struggles on for two more years. And finally, in April of 1975, the North Vietnamese launch a massive invasion of the South, drive down and capture Saigon, the capital of the South, which becomes Ho Chi Minh City. And the war is over with North Vietnam earning a decisive victory and unifying the country under communist control. For the United States, this is a huge embarrassment. It's seen as a loss, it's seen as an absolute defeat. The U.S. had spent years fighting this war ultimately to end up with a nation that was unified under communism. So for many Americans, this is seen as just an abject failure. Others though on the others on the other hand, say, well, the reality is that even though North Vietnam did take over the South, the reality is that communism didn't spread that far. That communism didn't take over all of Southeast Asia and didn't spread to Australia or spread to other parts of India. So they say the reality is that this wasn't as bad as many people thought it was. And so there are two very two kind of conflicting perspectives on the war. Now, as I said, I want to talk a little bit about the cost of this conflict because it came at a severe cost for the United States, both in terms of men lost, in terms of money spent. To give you an idea, first for U.S. troops on the ground, about 2.8 million soldiers fought in Vietnam during the years that the United States was engaged in the conflict. Many of these were blue collar workers, largely poor. By the end of the war, many tended to be minorities. Average age for most U.S. soldiers was, in fact, 19 years old. As I said earlier, this was a war that was so different than any war the U.S. had been involved in that it was really hard for many people to understand because there were no clear objectives, no front lines. The enemy could be anyone and anywhere. And as the war continued, it became much more tension between the troops and officers who also became a lot more racial tension in the ranks as more and more African-Americans are drafted and begin to resent being drafted and resent white officers and white enlisted men. And ultimately, this very discipline begins to break down and becomes a source of great problem for the United States Army. Finally, when the war, for many of the people who fought in the war because this was a war which you did your year and then you went home, there was no real homecoming. You didn't have victory parades. You didn't have celebrations for troops returning. Troops got off the plane in their hometown. Most of the time took off their uniform and that was it. So you didn't have the sense of victory when people fought in the war and certainly because of the way the war ultimately ends with the South collapsing to the North, this large sense of defeat and kind of dejection for those who were involved in the conflict. Ultimately, if we want to tally everything up, for the 20 years that the U.S. is involved in the war between supporting the South and having troops on the ground and then removing troops and supporting the South again, ultimately costs about 270,000 wounded and 58,000 killed. In terms of cost, $150 billion, $150,000 billion, would be a way to put it. So we're talking about a massive, massive, massive investment in the war. Of course, for great costs for those from South Vietnam and North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, probably about 2 million Vietnamese were killed in this conflict, both as military troops in the North or Vietnamese communist guerrillas and also civilians. And ultimately, we come down to that last question, did containment work? Did the domino theory prove correct? And we can say, well, no, not really. Well, maybe we did indeed contain the spread of communism, but ultimately, as I said at the beginning of this lecture, we just didn't understand what communism was in Asia. We didn't really understand what the communists were trying to do. So even if we hadn't intervened, it's entirely possible that communism would not have expanded, but it's impossible to know. The reality is that communism remained largely isolated in Vietnam, it did spread a little bit to Cambodia and Laos, but ultimately didn't spread to the rest of Asia and the rest of Australia as well. So we can't say, the war was a massive cost for the United States while it maybe did contain the spread of communism, it certainly didn't do what those who initially advocated for the US to be involved said it would happen. So we have to sort of look at the costs and the consequences and say, well, was it worth it? Perhaps, given the consequences for the United States, perhaps not.