The document provides background on the American involvement in the Vietnam War. It discusses France's colonial rule over Vietnam and its eventual defeat, leading to the partitioning of Vietnam into North and South Vietnam. It then outlines the rise of Ngo Dinh Diem as leader of South Vietnam and increasing American military advisors. It describes the escalating American involvement under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, including massive bombing campaigns and increasing troop levels under General Westmoreland. A major turning point was the 1968 Tet Offensive, which showed the limitations of Westmoreland's strategy and undermined public support for the war in the United States.

1. A Look at The Vietnam War
The American Presence in a Land They Did Not Understand
Susan Bertolino-Temple University

2. Dedication
 This powerpoint is dedicated to the memory of the
American soldiers who lost their lives in battle, the
Vietnamese soldiers who lost their lives in battle, the
many American soldiers who felt as if they died in the
Vietnam War, the immeasurable deaths of Vietnamese
civilians, the families and friends of every veteran,
American and Vietnamese, and to every soldier who
may feel that we civilians do not appreciate the
sacrifice they perform on a daily basis. You will never
be forgotten.
 Susan Bertolino
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3. Focus of This Powerpoint
 There is so much to say about the Vietnam War
that I cannot do it justice in one survey. I will
focus mainly on the American role, our mission
and the result of our involvement.
 Consider this question as we examen our military
presence in the Vietnam War: did we break the
social contract with our own people when we sent
our soldiers to Vietnam? Did we break the social
contract as defined by John Locke far earlier than
our decision to send troops to assist South
Vietnam?
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4. Timeline
 For dates and a timeline, look at the following link:
http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/timeline/i
ndex.html This is from the site Battlefield
Vietnam. This timeline is relatively simple to
follow, yet it is very complete without bogging the
reader down with extraneous detail about
contemporary American cultural events.
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5. Immediately Before the Americans: Vietnam War
 What we call the Vietnam War is actually called The Second
Indochina War, 1954-1975. It grew out of a long conflict between
France and Vietnam—it became an example of the decline of
colonialism and the immersion of the people as governor’s of their
own destiny.
 These same battles were fought throughout the world against
colonial powers: India, the Sudan, Angola, Mozambique, Surinam,
and West Indies: many European countries, weakened by two world
wars, were no longer able to defend their dominance in these lands.
In some cases, the decolonization was relatively peaceful: Britain
granted Jamaica became independent in 1962, the Spanish Sahara
gained independence from Spain after the death of Franco in 1976,
but generally there was violence, upheaval and resistance.
 France especially saw its power as a colonial ruler shift into chaos:
the fight to keep Algiers is one of the best examples. France was
named as a victor against fascism after WWII, but that was only
because of their alliance with Britain and the United States. France
knew that they contributed little direct effort to the WWII fight as
they were conquered by the Nazis on June, 22, 1940 after the
Germans invaded France and the Low Countries on May 10th, 1940.
Despite the best efforts of the French resistance run by Charles De
Galle to regain control of their country, the defeat of the Nazis came
through the combined efforts of the Soviet Union, Britain and the
United States, who entered the war in 1941.
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6. Vietnam Map Pre WWII
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7. Eisenhower Years
 In 1954, France lost a decisive victory to the Vietminh, the fighting force in
Vietnam that opposed the French colonists. After this loss, France sued for
peace.
 Under the direction of the Geneva Peace Accords, Vietnam was
partitioned into 2 countries: North Vietnam and South Vietnam.
 The decision reflected the tensions of the Cold War: the Korea War, still
fresh in the minds of the Communist superpowers, China and the Soviet
Union, influenced this decision: they did not want to provoke the United
States, the powerful ally of France.
 The North became the terrain of the Vietnamese Communists, led by Ho
Chi Minh, and the South was ostensibly to be under the control of the
Vietnamese monarchy.
 Elections were to take place in 1956; however the monarchy was abolished
in 1955, and the Prime Minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, won a controversial
election. The United States supported his rise to power: he was staunchly
anti-communist, he represented the Catholic minority in the country (many
Vietnamese converted to Catholicism under French rule), and he seemed to
be the most amendable to American direction in the new country.
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8.  Map of North and South Vietnam during the American intervention
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9. Ngo Dinh Diem/JFK Years
 Diem turned out to be an oppressive ruler. He passes a series of laws that allowed
for detention without a warrant, destruction of property and executions: these laws
were justified as a counter threat to the growing Communism movement among the
people. Diem worked closely with the CIA to identify those who tried to bring down
his regime, even those who were not communists. Thousands were arrested.
 Diem murdered and oppressed the Buddhists, setting off what was called the
Buddhist Crisis. In 1963, a company of civil guards, commanded by a Catholic
officer, killed nine persons, some of them children during a protest: the Buddhists
were not allowed to fly the Buddhist flag on Buddha’s birthday. Monks began to set
themselves afire as a further protest against the Diem oppression.
 Students in Saigon University rioted. Diem closed the university and the high school
students rioted. All of this was captured on film and reported by the world media.
Diem once said of the monks: “I will be glad to supply the gasoline and a match.”
 His brother’s wife, Madame Nhu, perhaps hated even more than her husband,
added that the demonstrators “should be beaten ten times more” by the police; she
also said: “I shall clap my hands” at another suicide. She used a phrase that Nixon
later made famous: she claimed that the rule of her family was supported by a “silent
majority”.
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10. The End of Diem Under JFK
 Only the younger brother, Ngo Dihn Can, who lived in Hue and was the
overlord of Central Vietnam, wanted to settle with the Buddhists. His brother
didn’t listen, and there was an increase in police oppression as the monks
continued their self-sacrifices.
Diem assumed the United States would support his government in
whatever
methods he used, because the fear of a Communist overthrow would stay their
hand.
 The Kennedy administration was split on keeping Diem in power. Some found
him to be terribly objectionable and they saw his propensity for causing
division; others called him “the best of a bad lot.” However, even his
supporters could not ignore the abuses; even some of Diem’s generals
approached the American embassy with plans to overthrow Diem.
 With Washington’s tacit approval, Diem and his brother were captured on
Nov. 1, 1963. They were later executed. Diem’s wife escaped to France. At this
time, we had 16,000 military advisors in Vietnam, assisting the ARVN—Army
of the Republic of Vietnam. President Kennedy was killed 3 weeks later in
Dallas.
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11. The US Advisors in Vietnam
 The purpose of our advisors was to help the Vietnamese fight the growing
communist insurgency: the guerrillas, whom we later called the Viet Cong,
were becoming stronger as students and peasants joined the movement.
 The Diem government couldn’t understand that their repressive tactics
actually convinced more people to join the guerrillas: unlike the ARVN, the
Viet Cong came to the villages without harming the populace, paid for their
rice and even worked the fields with the peasants.
 The ARVN would destroy villages, kill suspected guerillas at random and
rape the women. The common soldier in the ARVN was either conscripted
or fighting for a wage. They did not have the dedication or sense of purpose
that the Viet Cong soldiers had.
 The generals of the ARVN were often afraid to send their soldiers in battle
because Diem feared a military coup; the more soldiers he lost, the more
precarious his position became---in his opinion. This alone, without the help
of the Chinese and the Soviets, helped the guerrilla movement to grow in
South Vietnam.
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12. LBJ and Escalation
 On August 2, 1964, the captain of the Maddox insisted that his ship was
attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin, even though the
North Vietnamese disputed this claim.
 It is highly possible that Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense under
both Kennedy and Johnson, knew that no attack had taken place.
 However, the Johnson administration used this attack to gain a
Congressional resolution, called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This gave
the president broad war powers.
 LBJ began bombing North Vietnam and in March 1965, the first Marine force
landed in Vietnam. The Americans began what was called OPERATION
ROLLING THUNDER: a systematic bombing campaign in North Vietnam,
aimed at bridges, factories, parks, train depots, roads.
 The U.S. offered economic aid in exchange for peace: the U.S. wanted the
North to stop aiding the Vietcong in the South. They refused, and the
bombing continued. By this time, the Chinese were open allies of the North
Vietnamese.
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13. General Westmoreland-Westy
 By 1968, there were over 500,000 American troops stationed in
Vietnam. General William Westmoreland, commanded the
Vietnam War effort and he asked for what he called an
“Optimum Force” of 678,000 if the president wished to hasten
victory.
 Westmoreland, nicknamed “Westy”, created a strategy called
the “war of attrition”.
 He based his theory on the success of World War II’s bombing
of Japan and Germany into surrender.
 He estimated that Vietnam could be controlled by literally
killing as many guerrillas as possible so that there would be
few left to instigate insurgency. The next powerpoints show
the implications of his strategy:
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14. Implications of the War of Attrition
 U.S. forces had superior weapons to the Vietcong: the North Vietnamese got
their weapons from both China and the U.S.S.R.—neither country had the
economic clout to build superior conventional arms, despite their dual
success in developing the atomic bomb.
 Our troops would follow a search and destroy mission to destabilize the
guerrillas. They find the enemy and defeat him on his terrain. These were
also called “Zippo Missions”, after the zippo cigarette lighters that were
caught on cameras as they were used to set villages afire.
 The objective was to kill and weaken the enemy, so that he would be
demoralized and he would eventually surrender.
 Attrition meant annihilate, and it also didn’t provide for civilians. We had
only 3 military hospitals that addressed wounded civilians—only 10% were
served. When asked about the mounting civilian deaths from air strikes and
shelling, Westmoreland replied: Yes…it is a problem. But it does deprive the
enemy of the population, doesn’t it.” (source: A Bright Shining Lie )
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15. Problems with the Strategy
In order to kill the enemy, the troops had to find him. American troops did not know
the terrain, and many had trouble maintaining their health in the jungle environment.
The enemy developed a strategy in which they would seemingly flee from the American
troops, then suddenly appear and open fire. Often this took place at night. Brigadier
General Vuong Thua Vu discussed the strategy in the book They Marched into Sunlight.
The American troops relied on air and artillery units to aid them in combat once they
were in battle. The enemy fought close to them, too close for them to call in air force
power or else they would be hit (friendly fire).
 Confusion. “When he believed we attacked from the east, we attacked from the west.
When he believed we stopped, we attacked again. When he believed we advanced,
we stopped…Truth and falsehood, falsehood and truth.” (from They Marched Into
Sunlight.)
 Americans did not know the language or the culture. They weren’t able to
distinguish features or accents that may have implied North or South Vietnamese.
Moreover, they were associated with the enemy.
 Attrition meant life was cheap. If the enemy had to be destroyed at all costs, what
did this say about the American soldier? The psychology of attrition began to extend
toward their own troops—life in itself became seen as expendable.
 This led to an increase of post-traumatic stress among our Vietnam veterans
Statistics vary, but some have indicated that over 70% of our soldiers suffered from
some kind of PTSD symptom, more than double of the WWII veterans.
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16. Search and Destroy
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17. Tet Offensive: January 31, 1968
This part of the war is now considered to be the turning point in the
Vietnam War; it became the antithesis of Westmoreland’s strategy—
we became the demoralized, the insignificant.
It showed how seriously our military had underestimated the
determination of the Vietcong forces. It also showed that they too
could fight a war of attrition against themselves and still come out the
victor.
The North Vietnamese forces launched a systematic attack against key
southern Vietnamese cities. They sent 70, 000 troops into urban areas.
The attacks had been planned since 1967.
The American embassy in Saigon was seized. It shifted the war from
the rural areas into the supposed impregnable areas of the south. The
Vietcong fought in Saigon for two weeks, block by block. They held
the small city of Hue for 25 days.
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18. Tet Offensive Map
:
Americans Fighting in Saigon
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19. Tet Offensive Continued
 The Tet Offensive did not achieve its ultimate goals:
no city or territory was taken permanently. The
Vietcong lost thousands of soldiers; the majority of
these fighters were seasoned veterans and officers
from NCOs to battalion-level leaders.
 Many of the ordinary soldiers became demoralized
by the losses because they thought the battles had
been unrealistic. Soon 70% of the Vietcong forces in
the South were North Vietnamese sent down by Ho
Chi Minh.
 The Southern rebels had died, but they had
achieved a tremendous psychological victory over
the Americans: (See Next Slide)
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20. The Effect of The Tet Offensive on America
 1. Americans watched the battles on television. They saw the determination of
the enemy. They now knew he was not an inferior Asian as many of the
Japanese stereotypes had lingered from World War II. The enemy became
worthy of respect.
 2. They also began to doubt that this war could be won. If the Vietcong were
willing to sacrifice their best soldiers to make a decisive attack, then what else
were their capabilities?
 3. Westmoreland’s strategy was a failure. Not only had he not destroyed the
enemy, he had created new members for lost soldiers. Despite the claims for
high body count, the enemy was willing to fight to the death; they also found
reinforcements no matter how many we killed.
 4. Since the war now appeared unwinnable, there was no reason for us to fight
in it. As Neil Sheenan wrote: “The spectacle broadened opposition to the war
and made it a profound moral concern, not just for students and intellectuals,
but also for a large segment of the middle class who had no sons of draft
age….Westmoreland contributed by playing as ever into the hands of the
enemy….the man who thought he was baiting was unable to understand that he
had been baited.” (from A Bright Shining Lie)
 Even as Westmoreland threw more soldiers at the enemy, the Vietcong kept
coming back to fight, despite having suffered severe losses. They were not going
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to go away.

21. Vietnamization
 Richard Nixon had won the 1968 election. LBJ refused to run, Robert
Kennedy had been murdered, and Eugene McCarthy was popular among
students but not the middle class. Nixon did not want to go down as a
president who lost a war, but he also knew that he had to begin
withdrawing American troops in order to ensure his popularity.
 Nixon’s objective was to make the ARVN, the South Vietnamese Army,
more responsible for its fate instead of relying on American guidance and
manpower. As Nixon withdrew troops, he increased the bombing over
North Vietnam, gradually extending the war into Laos and Cambodia.
 In 1970 Nixon approved of attacks into Cambodia as a way of rooting out
Vietcong sanctuaries. As American troops fatalities dropped, Nixon
thought he would win more support for the war effort.
 In his speech on Cambodia on April 30th, 1970, Nixon justified his
aggression by claiming that there were Vietnamese strongholds “up to 20
miles into Cambodia”. He insisted that the attacks would cease once the
North Vietnamese cooperated; it was not an attack against Cambodia.
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22. The My Lai Massacre And Kent State
 The disgust with the Vietnam War encouraged more student
protests, including the infamous Kent State protest on May 4,
1970 in which the National Guard fired into a crowd of unarmed
students at a legal protest. 4 died.
 The war was becoming more unpopular as war crimes became
known to the general public. becoming aware of war crimes: Lt.
William Calley Jr. had ordered a massacre of peasants in the
hamlet of My Lai. 347 people were killed. This massacre took
place on March 16, 1968 toward the end of the Tet Offensive, but
it came to light in 1969.
 Although other massacres and forced evacuations of civilians had
taken place prior to this, Calley’s actions gained the most
notoriety for the sheer sadism of the acts.
 Calley was convicted of the crime and many felt he had become a
scapegoat of the military. Even Nixon intervened to have his
sentence reduced. He was convicted to life imprisonment, but
only served 3 years, mostly under house arrest.
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23. Kent State
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24. My Lai Massacre
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25. This is a picture of a woman taken seconds before she was shot in the massacre. See the
following link for more information on the massacre:
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/learning_history/vietnam/vietnam_mylai.cfm
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26. Ending American Involvement in
Vietnam
 In 1973, we signed a treaty with the North Vietnamese
called the Paris Accords. We ceased all military action in
Vietnam at this time.
 The war itself did not end until 1975, when the ARVN were
unable to resist the oncoming North Vietnamese forces.
 Casualties of American soldiers are 58,226. The Vietnam
Memorial lists 58, 152. The Army suffered the most total
casualties, 38,179 or 2.7 of its force.
 The Marine Corps lost 14,836 or 5% of its force. The Navy
lost 2, 556 or 2 %. The Air Force lost 2580 or 1 percent.
Many pilots became North Vietnamese prisoners; the
most famous is John McCain. 304,000 Americans were
wounded and over 10,000 are missing in action.
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27. The Vietnamese Dead
 As for the Vietnamese dead and wounded, figures are still unclear. Some
estimate that the dead alone are almost 4 million. Some keep it to arund 3
million. We really don’t know. Record keeping was very poor, especially by
the South Vietnamese toward the end of the war., and the North tended to
deflate the numbers because of morale.
 Many peasants were not listed among the dead. Many of our bombs simply
evaporated people. It is easier to determine the dead among the soldiers
because there were registered names and that averages between 1.1 to 1.5
million of North Vietnamese alone
 For decades, the Vietnamese government kept the figures to about 900,000
Vietcong and North Vietnamese combined, an absurdly low figure when one
takes into account that 181,00 Vietcong and NVA died in 1968 after the Tet
Offensive ; this figure does not include Northern or Southern Vietnamese
civilians.
 There are still unexploded land mines and other types of bombs all over the
country. Around 40,000 deaths since the war have been attributed to these
bombs. Many are almost impossible to find, and the country does not have the
financial resources to search for these well-hidden land mines. These
explosives are still a problem for the Vietnamese people. For more information
on this ongoing situation, see the following link:
http://www.pbs.org/vietnampassage/perspectives/perspectives.landmines.
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28. Vietnam Today
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