‘Nam.

In the summer of 1964 The United States were helping the South Vietnamese government fight against a communist insurgent force from North Vietnam that were trying to unify the country under communism. It was in the United State’s interest to maintain the brutal dictatorship in South Vietnam who were capitalist to prevent the further spread of communism in Southeast Asia. This is due to the belief of “the domino effect” where if one nation were to fall to communism then the whole region would begin to fall and be lost. At this point the US had only a small “advising force” of around 16,000 training the South Vietnamese army to combat the Vietcong. In August of 1964 in the gulf of Tonkin, US Naval forces were attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson who was sworn in in 1963 after Kennedy was assassinated used this event as proof for the need of escalation in the Vietnam conflict to “protect the troops there” as he believed conflict was inevitable and wanted to maintain the struggling South Vietnam government without actually declaring war on the Soviet Union backed North Vietnam. However the entire incident was a misdirection to justify the escalation of US troops. The naval forces there fired first and were attacking Vietcong gunboats to support South Vietnamese take over of 2 Islands that were already planned by US military advisers. Due to the escalation, in February of 1965, 8 soldiers were killed and 126 wounded at Camp Holloway, a helicopter outpost, near Pleiku by VC guerillas. In retaliation, Johnson ordered Operation ‘Rolling Thunder’ which was the first sustained bombardment of North Vietnam to weaken further Vietcong incursion into the south. By the summer of 1965, the US was engaged in full on ‘search and destroy’ missions across South Vietnam. With no real clear military strategy to win a war that was not officially declared other than to maintain the status quo of the South, the use of chemical weapons such as agent orange and napalm, along with “Huey” copters used to fight and drop troops across the country to “find and destroy the enemy” became a new version of trench warfare as a battle of attrition in who can outlast or outkill the other. By 1968 the United States had over 400,000 troops in Vietnam fighting a costly meandering conflict with no clear goal and a president who was adamant not to be the first to lose a war. The turning point happened on January 31st of 1968 known as the ‘Tet offensive’ where the Vietcong coordinated a powerful surprise assault across South Vietnam taking advantage of the new year ceasefire that the North and South had agreed to before. The old capital city of Hue was captured by communists and the American embassy in Saigon was occupied. However the US managed to defeat and push back the Vietcong through superior firepower and was a strategic success for the United States. However, politically it was a colossal defeat as the initial loss was televised which broke original claims by Johnson that the war was “going well” and also help spurring the massive anti-war movement back in the states. The movement was compounded by the assassinations of MLK and Robert Kennedy that same year of 1968 along with the narrow political victory of Nixon who promised an end the “liberal attacks on the American way of life” from civil rights and anti-war protests. Nixon did cunningly well on foreign policy and ending the Vietnam war. In 1969 he approved a secret prolonged 14 month bombardment on North Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia where suspected communist forces resided while gradually withdrawing troops. Then another massive bombing in 1972 of the two major cities in the north in Hanoi and Haiphong. By the end of 1972 the amount of troops dropped to 50,000 which weakened the anti-war movement along with the ending of the draft and the passing of the 26th amendment which allowed 18 year olds the right to vote. In January of 1973, the United States, South and North Vietnam signed a peace treaty to end the fighting in Vietnam. This was actually a ploy by Nixon to have the US get out of the war and save face knowing full well the peace would not last even for the short term. Barely a few months later North Vietnam attacked the South and by 1975, Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam fell. In the end, 58,000 Americans were killed, 300,000 were wounded, and 100,000 returned home missing limbs with the total cost of the war being $158 billion. The ones who came back ‘unscathed’ returned with severe ptsd and a population who spat on them and called them war pigs for the uniform they wore even though a vast majority of them had been drafted against their will.

There was nothing to show for it.