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The sad thing is that it was a completely avoidable war. I could quote a fiction book about that, but it would constitute self-advertising.
Mod
Consider how most Americans felt about their govt during or after the WWII era ...that, vs after Vietnam.
Completely overhauled.
Having researched quite a lot the Indochina Conflict in order to write parts of my books, here are what I believe to be the main points where and how things went wrong...for everybody:
1. Ho Chi Minh was leading the best organized guerrila group fighting the Japanese in Indochina during WW2 and was in fact getting help from the OSS. Yet, when he asked for the USA's help in 1945 in order for his country to gain its independence from the French, Washington ignored him, dismissing him as a Communist rather than a nationalist. That forced Ho Chi Minh to search for support elsewhere.
2. When France and General De Gaule decided to retake control of Indochina after the Japanese departed in 1945, Washington didn't oppose that, thus preparing the ground for the first phase of the Indochina Conflict (French vs Vietminh).
3. Washington painted an oversimplistic view of the opposition to French rule, mislabeling many Vietnamese nationalists as pro-communists supporters. Then, Washington gave military and financial support to the French occupation forces, supposedly to help combat the spread of communism, when France couldn't afford the burden of the war alone. There was thus a golden opportunity missed in the late 1940s and early 1950s to starve out the war and force France to stop its colonial exploitation of Indochina.
4. The USA kept backing the wrong political horses in Indochina, through simplistic and amateurish judgments of the players and situation on the ground. It ended up backing corrupt, unpopular politicians, causing more people to become disillusionned with the government in Saigon.
5. Washington was not pushed into the war: it invented a pretext to enter the war fully (Gulf of Tonkin Incident), and this after gradually escalating the sending of American military advisors in Vietnam.
6. Once fully into the war, the USA militarily bungled things up by using the wrong tactics (a war of attrition against guerrila forces) and by completely misunderstanding its enemy through sloppy intelligence and by grossly underestimating the will to fight of the enemy. General Westmoreland was in my opinion the wrong general to lead the war in Vietnam. Worst, there was no credible long-term plan to bring an end to the war, just a gradual escalation of the military effort.
7. Even if adequate tactics and plans would have been followed by American forces in Vietnam, politicians in Washington kept interfering in the war, micro-managing battles from Washington (SecDef MacNamara and his civilian 'wiz kids' 'advisors' who kept telling generals what to do). While many American soldiers fought bravely, their leadership sank into rank amateurism and lost touch of what the war was really about.
In short, I believe that the whole mess could have been avoided, but that would have needed for the right decisions to have been taken early on, right at the end of WW2. Instead, France bankrupted itself to run the war, yet still lost its colony (it repeated the same mistake again in Algeria), while the USA entered a war for no good reason, a war that cost it 58,000 dead and put the country in a deep financial deficit.
1. Ho Chi Minh was leading the best organized guerrila group fighting the Japanese in Indochina during WW2 and was in fact getting help from the OSS. Yet, when he asked for the USA's help in 1945 in order for his country to gain its independence from the French, Washington ignored him, dismissing him as a Communist rather than a nationalist. That forced Ho Chi Minh to search for support elsewhere.
2. When France and General De Gaule decided to retake control of Indochina after the Japanese departed in 1945, Washington didn't oppose that, thus preparing the ground for the first phase of the Indochina Conflict (French vs Vietminh).
3. Washington painted an oversimplistic view of the opposition to French rule, mislabeling many Vietnamese nationalists as pro-communists supporters. Then, Washington gave military and financial support to the French occupation forces, supposedly to help combat the spread of communism, when France couldn't afford the burden of the war alone. There was thus a golden opportunity missed in the late 1940s and early 1950s to starve out the war and force France to stop its colonial exploitation of Indochina.
4. The USA kept backing the wrong political horses in Indochina, through simplistic and amateurish judgments of the players and situation on the ground. It ended up backing corrupt, unpopular politicians, causing more people to become disillusionned with the government in Saigon.
5. Washington was not pushed into the war: it invented a pretext to enter the war fully (Gulf of Tonkin Incident), and this after gradually escalating the sending of American military advisors in Vietnam.
6. Once fully into the war, the USA militarily bungled things up by using the wrong tactics (a war of attrition against guerrila forces) and by completely misunderstanding its enemy through sloppy intelligence and by grossly underestimating the will to fight of the enemy. General Westmoreland was in my opinion the wrong general to lead the war in Vietnam. Worst, there was no credible long-term plan to bring an end to the war, just a gradual escalation of the military effort.
7. Even if adequate tactics and plans would have been followed by American forces in Vietnam, politicians in Washington kept interfering in the war, micro-managing battles from Washington (SecDef MacNamara and his civilian 'wiz kids' 'advisors' who kept telling generals what to do). While many American soldiers fought bravely, their leadership sank into rank amateurism and lost touch of what the war was really about.
In short, I believe that the whole mess could have been avoided, but that would have needed for the right decisions to have been taken early on, right at the end of WW2. Instead, France bankrupted itself to run the war, yet still lost its colony (it repeated the same mistake again in Algeria), while the USA entered a war for no good reason, a war that cost it 58,000 dead and put the country in a deep financial deficit.
Feliks wrote: "The last American war in which men were drafted; Vietnam is now our 'forgotten war'. A lot of us would like to forget..........
Mod
Half a million men injured? Staggering. It reminds one of WWI, the first war where 1 million men died. It later became 10m. But I forget how many men were injured in that trench warfare...
The difference between WW1 and the Vietnam War was the advances in military medicine and, most importantly, the massive use of helicopters to effect the rapid evacuation of wounded to the field hospitals. One should not however overlook the amount of long-time, sometimes lifelong suffering and handicaps to all those American wounded represented even after the war's end.
My two favorite fiction books set in the period. One's the eviscerating character study of idealistic fanaticism, while the other is a heavily romanticized portrait of the war.
I believe that 'THE QUIET AMERICAN' does a good job of showing the kind of amateurish, misguided actions by American politicians and intelligence organizations taken in the early phase of the Indochina conflict.
Michel wrote: "I believe that 'THE QUIET AMERICAN' does a good job of showing the kind of amateurish, misguided actions by American politicians and intelligence organizations taken in the early phase of the Indoc..."Indeed. cautionary tale of how foreign policy hubris can destroy lives. Alden Pyle, the CIA officer and titular Quiet American is the embodiment of this. Engaging in what for all intents and purposes is state sponsored terrorism, he finances militants to conduct bombings of public places.
After watching one of the attacks, he goes to visit the interior minister of South Vietnam, but not before callously wiping off the blood which splattered onto his loafers.
Michel wrote: "I believe that 'THE QUIET AMERICAN' does a good job of showing the kind of amateurish, misguided actions by American politicians and intelligence organizations taken in the early phase of the Indoc..."Graham Greene wrote a very timeless spy novel. Aspects of The Quiet American have popped up to this day, particularly with the sponsorship of murderous political actors simply out of realpolitik or more half baked justifications.
Mod
I don't see our politicians as having improved their thinking in the slightest. How many troops do we have in the Mid-East right at this moment? At what point would we not find ourselves going down the same road? Why are we always participating in these horrible experiments instead of ever fixing what is really wrong with our country? National debt, social security, the environment (constant procrastination); the endless shuffle of pork-barrel politicians across our tv screens, our futile dependency on fossil fuels...and here we are, always returning to some new adventure for the industrial-military complex to fatten themselves on.
Vietnam and each successive conflict are symptoms of a dangerously ill patient...and I'll add this as well: digital media is now keeping this population in a helpless stupor, unable to even comprehend any of this anymore. Right now tens of millions of people are watching cable-tv; or else they are preparing themselves for an upcoming frenzy of berserk holday purchasing (our only religious urge left). Madness!
Feliks wrote: " Why are we always participating in these horrible experiments instead of ever fixing what is really wrong with our country? National debt, social security (constant procrastination dealing with these) the endless shuffle of pork-barrel politicians across our tv screens, our futile dependency on fossil fuels..Well, amen to that. I listen (actually I don't) to these pols attack and promise and have nothing to do with fixing the real problems. Sick of 'em.
Just to put the Vietnam experience in a modern context, if we compare it to a more recent conflict that turned sour for the U.S.A., the Iraq War, we see nearly the same dumb mistakes being remade:
- Starting or jumping into a war for the wrong reasons (aiding the French colonial policies in Indochina; going after non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq);
- Poor to non-existent knowledge by the Washington decision-makers of the local situation and political/ethnic/social roots of the conflict (assumption that Vietminh were all fervent communists, rather than being mostly nationalists wanting the end of French colonial rule in Indochina; ignoring the Chiite/Sunni divide in Iraq);
- Amateurish and shallow intelligence analysis and reports, often tainted with racism (underestimating the enemy) and overconfidence, reports that only aggravated the wrong decision-making by politicians in Washington;
- Joining the conflict with no clear endstate and long term plan about how and when to exit;
- Supporting the wrong local political players out of ignorance/incomprehension of the local political situation (President Diem in South Vietnam, Prime Minister al Maliki in Iraq);
- Ham-fisted use of massive firepower, causing heavy so-called 'collateral damage';
- Subordination/hijacking of war strategy to make it fit the special interests of big American corporations (the famous military-industrial complex).
Unfortunately, it seems that, watching the political circus in Washington, the conflict in Syria and against ISIS is nearly as poorly understood by policy-makers than the Indochina conflict and the Iraq War.
- Starting or jumping into a war for the wrong reasons (aiding the French colonial policies in Indochina; going after non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq);
- Poor to non-existent knowledge by the Washington decision-makers of the local situation and political/ethnic/social roots of the conflict (assumption that Vietminh were all fervent communists, rather than being mostly nationalists wanting the end of French colonial rule in Indochina; ignoring the Chiite/Sunni divide in Iraq);
- Amateurish and shallow intelligence analysis and reports, often tainted with racism (underestimating the enemy) and overconfidence, reports that only aggravated the wrong decision-making by politicians in Washington;
- Joining the conflict with no clear endstate and long term plan about how and when to exit;
- Supporting the wrong local political players out of ignorance/incomprehension of the local political situation (President Diem in South Vietnam, Prime Minister al Maliki in Iraq);
- Ham-fisted use of massive firepower, causing heavy so-called 'collateral damage';
- Subordination/hijacking of war strategy to make it fit the special interests of big American corporations (the famous military-industrial complex).
Unfortunately, it seems that, watching the political circus in Washington, the conflict in Syria and against ISIS is nearly as poorly understood by policy-makers than the Indochina conflict and the Iraq War.
Mod
..."
Well done. Recently I was thinking about faint parallels between the Peloponnesian War and the American Civil War. I haven't read anything except the first of Michael Shaara's famous series; but maybe it's explored there? Anyone know?
As a Brit it's difficult to understand the impact of Vietnam on America, although we've had many a cock up in our time (Suez etc.)As for books, try a fiction one by Nelson Demille set after the war, but with a back drop to it.
A few of my favorite fiction books on Viet Nam. Tree of Smoke
Denis Johnson
Matterhorn
Karl Marlantes
A River in May
Edward Wilson
and my all time favorite
The Centurions
Jean Lartéguy
SSG: Spy/Spec-Ops Group
Books mentioned in this topic
Tree of Smoke (other topics)Matterhorn (other topics)
A River in May (other topics)
The Centurions (other topics)
The Centurions (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Denis Johnson (other topics)Karl Marlantes (other topics)
Edward Wilson (other topics)
Jean Lartéguy (other topics)
In this group, we rarely talk about this pivotal conflict. I want to amend this situation slightly.
Vietnam fiction? Nonfiction? Favorite titles; topics which should be raised?