The Vietnam War was a war fought on many fronts. America failed to comprehend a strategy that took into consideration the wider context of the war and therefore was drawn into a bloody stalemate and eventual defeat. By assessing a number of these fronts it is possible to argue that America contextualized the war within a limited framework and how its single emphasis on military victory lacked the necessary ability to win the wider war. By considering how it used conventional warfare within a jungle environment, how it failed to consider the nationalist impulse of Hanoi, its dismissal of the importance of the village war, its support of a unpopular government, and by its inability to consolidate opposition at home and control the media, one can note that Washington was unable to reach victory and eventually had to concede to a compromise. Therefore, it is not possible to blame one distinct factor in composing an American defeat. By an eclectic amalgam of misconceptions and ignorance within American policymaking towards each of these factors America fell far short of victory.
In the aftermath of World War II the United States emerged as the great superpower of the world and adopted the role as the world’s policeman. By 1961 the world was split between East and West. McCarthyism during the 1950s had exasperated a ‘Red Scare’ across America with the universe coming to the verge of nuclear annihilation with the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was the age of John F. Kennedy, who set the atmosphere with his inaugural address declaring, ‘ask not what your country can do for; ask what you can do for your country.’ Having faced humiliation at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy sought to reassert America’s credibility across the international spectrum. Kennedy affirmed the domino theory of U.S. interests in Southeast Asia in 1956 before congress proclaiming:
[Vietnam] represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike. Burma, Thailand, India, Japan, the Philippines and obviously Laos and Cambodia are among those whose security would be threatened if the red tide of Communism overflowed into Vietnam.
Suffering from a Cold War mentality, and the government attempting to avoid being tarnished as soft on communism, American intervention in Vietnam was rationalized within Cold War politics. As military personnel traveled 10,000 miles across the globe they entered a conflict in which they failed to understand the enemy’s cause. Jack S. Swender, a lance corporal, explained the reason he was fighting in Vietnam:
Some people wonder why Americans are in Vietnam. The way I see the situation, I would rather fight to stop communism in South Vietnam than in Kincaid, Humbolt, Blue Mound, or Kansas City, and that is just about what it would end up being.
As America used Cold War politics to justify its intervention in Southeast Asia, it failed to understand the complexity of the Vietnamese people. For the past twenty-five years the Vietnamese had fought against foreign control by the Chinese, Japanese and the French. Having received their independence from French colonial rule and with the desire to setup an independent nation was confronted now with America seeking to impose its Cold War politics on the country. Therefore for Hanoi, the war was just a continuation of a nationalist revolution. Diem Chau, the editor of Trinh Bay magazine, depicted the Vietnamese opinion when he claimed, ‘this war is a war against the American imperialist. This is our war for independence.’ As Fitzgerald argues:
By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between colonels’ wives.
America was so determined to contain Communism, that it was even willing to support an unstable and corrupt government in Vietnam. The inability of the Saigon government to consolidate the support of the masses would prove to be a crucial factor in undermining America’s legitimacy to fight the war. In my personal correspondence with Chuck Peabody, a U.S. platoon leader serving in Vietnam between November 1968 and 1969, he wrote:
After WWII the US was paranoid about the spread of communism. It dominated their foreign policy to the point of the U.S. government assisting any third world dictator as long as he was not a “Red.” It didn’t matter how brutal or corrupt he was if [he] pledged to fight Communism.
Ngo Dinh Diem became the country’s first premier. Diem ran a corrupt and despotic regime. He established a nepotistic government, appointing family members to office. Diem’s brother, Nhu, became head of a secret terrorist police force, while his other brother Thuc was appointed the Catholic Archbishop of Hue. Diem’s dictatorship increasingly isolated the masses with Buddhists, who composed eighty percent of the population, suffering under Diem’s stringent Catholicism. Catholics often received favoured treatment, for example under Diem most provincial chiefs were Catholic. Moreover, he displaced peasants of their land by returning the elite landlords to control of the countryside. By 1961, the Saigon government lacked control of between eighty and ninety percent of the rural populace. As resentment fueled toward Diem and his family, a crisis exploded onto the streets of Hue on May 8, 1963, when Buddhist monks revolted against religious persecution. Protests spread, with a Buddhist monk immolating himself in Saigon on June 11. As shocking images of Thich Quang Duc in flames spread across the world, public opinion turned against American involvement. Furthermore, students, unions and even the military took to the streets. In November 1963, Diem became the victim of a political coup in which he and his brothers were assassinated. In 1964 there had been seven different governments established in South Vietnam, each corrupt and unpopular. The government of Saigon only remained in power due to the support of America. The majority of the population perceived it to be a puppet of the American imperialists. The government’s unpopularity played into the hands of the National Liberation Front (NLF) and Hanoi. NLF insurgents exploited the government’s weakness by winning over the ‘hearts and minds’ of the villagers appealing to their national impulse and providing opportunities for land, healthcare, sanitary, and educational reform. The backing of a corrupt and unpopular regime would be a crucial factor in America’s inability to win and pacify the people. The sponsorship of an unpopular regime only helped fuel anti-American sentiment. As Hughes-Wilson claims, ‘South Vietnam’s rotten, confused and corrupt regime was America’s fundamental strategic weakness in Indochina.’
In the mid-20th century America was the most technologically and economically advanced nation across the globe. Its universal prestige became the driving force of America’s escalation into Vietnam. When President Lyndon Baines Johnson reaffirmed America’s interests in Southeast Asia in the aftermath of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the driving assumption of American intervention was that she could fight a ‘limited war’ with a quick victory. Washington believed that the most advanced nation on earth could flex its military power to subdue Hanoi into a settlement on American terms. One journalist illustrated this view when on a visit to an aircraft carrier on the coast of Vietnam in 1965 he was reported to have said, ‘they just ought to show this ship to the Vietcong – that would make them give up.’ On February 13, 1965, Johnson authorized Operation ROLLING THUNDER. The rationale behind the operative was that by systematically bombing North Vietnam, Hanoi would be pushed over the ‘threshold of pain’ to the conference table. In 1965, the US Air Force flew some 55,000 sorties dropping 33,000 tons of bombs; by 1967 a huge fleet of B-52 bombers dropped 247,140 tonnage of explosives. Johnson had limited bombing to military targets and infiltration lines in 1965. By 1968 aerial targets expanded to petroleum depots and transportation networks. By the end of ROLLING THUNDER the US had dropped more bombs than in all the theaters of World War II. However, despite American efforts, Hanoi could not be bombed to the conference table. Between 1965 and 1968 around 500,000 Vietcong and NLF forces infiltrated the South. Furthermore, the aerial campaign had proved financially draining costing in 1966, $9.60 for every $1 worth of damage. The US from 1965 to 1968 lost 950 airplanes costing approximately $6 billion. Americans underestimate the resolve of what they saw as an agrarian backward nation. As Ruane highlights:
… ‘Rolling Thunder’ appears to have drawn an already regimented and tight-knit society even closer together and helped rather than hindered Hanoi’s efforts to mobilize the population in defence of themselves and their country. If American strategists had bothered to study Vietnamese history, such resilience in the face of an external threat might have been predicted. For more than a thousand years the Vietnamese had struggled to remain independent of a powerful China to the north, and a similar determination was evident in their more recent efforts to withstand the French and even the People’s Republic of China.
Moreover, as Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara later remorsefully noted to Newsweek in 1966:
[I] never thought it would go like this. I didn’t think these people had the capacity to fight this way. If I had thought they would take this punishment and fight this well, and could enjoy fighting like this, I would have thought differently at the start…
In 1965 President Johnson authorized the Americanization of the conflict. In March Johnson assigned two battalions of the Marine Corps into the South and by the end of the year the total deployment of US troops reached 184,300. As more and more troops were enlisted into South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland proposed a strategy of attrition. The aim was to disable the North Vietnamese insurgents quicker than they could be replaced. As one of Westmoreland’s advisors surmised it, ‘the solution in Vietnam is more bombs, more shells, more napalm… till the other side cracks and gives up.’ Attrition was based on the ideals of conventional warfare. Military strategists assumed that American forces could take the initiative and fight a war similar to that of World War II. However, Vietnam was fought without frontlines. The policy of attrition lacked the strategic understanding of guerrilla warfare. Through tunnel networks and their access to Cambodia and Laos, the Vietcong were able to determine the place, time and circumstances in which combat would be initiated. The North Vietnamese insurgents and Vietcong launched ninety percent of all land conflicts. The grunts found it impossible to distinguish between the enemy and the civilians, making US troops vulnerable to surprise attack. Attrition relied heavily on the body count to determine the scale of American victory. However, military officers under pressure to produce positive attrition rates among the enemy were notorious for exaggerating body counts. In certain instances the body count was exaggerated by 100 percent. Therefore, when results reached Washington it provided a flawed representation of the war. Attrition failed to undermine the North Vietnamese military strength with some 200,000 North Vietnamese males reaching draft age per year. In 1968 the North could boast of a total manpower of 2.3 million. One Commander noted, ‘the policy was attrition – killing VC – this offered no solution – it was senseless.’ As Record argues, ‘Westmoreland’s administrative practices succeeded in “attriting” U.S. forces more effectively than his attrition strategy did the PAVN and the VC.’ While extensive emphasis was placed on military strategy in winning the war, little effort was placed on fighting what would be termed the ‘other war.’ The village war was left to the backburner of US policy. As Westmoreland placed an importance on search-and-destroy operatives, after areas had been secured from Vietcong control, little effort was placed on permanent pacification. As soon as US troops left the region, Vietcong forces would move back in. Westmoreland failed to consider the impact his campaign of attrition had on the lives of the Vietnamese. Regions became free-fire zones, ancestral homes were burned, and livestock and civilians were subject to target practice. In 1971 an estimated 900,000 civilians were wounded and around 400,000 dead in the fighting campaign in the South. In sweeps across villages and hamlets, homes were destroyed Military operations resulted in the involuntary uprooting of some fifty percent of the population from the countryside into the cities. Refugees accounted for five million people in a country whose population was 17 million. American ground conflicts were severely detrimental to the livelihood of the Vietnamese. Chemical defoliants such as Agent Orange were sprayed on crops and vegetation, having a long-term impact on the health of the people. A country renowned for its rice exports in 1967 had to import 750,000 tons of rice. Americans showed little value to the lives of those they were supposedly there to protect. One of the most infamous cases was the My Lai massacre. On March 16, 1968, Company C of Task Force Barker carried out a search-and-destroy mission in the Hamlet of My Lai, which was believed to be a Vietcong stronghold. No enemy was ever encountered during the attack with some 175 to 200 villagers killed with a number of rape killings. Civilians were shot without discrimination including women, children and elderly men. Furthermore, this was not an isolated event, between January 1965 and March 1973 201 soldiers were court-martialed for crimes against the Vietnamese. Consequently, the military’s ignorance toward the ‘village war’ helped bolster support for the NLF, and strengthened Vietnamese opposition to the American invasion. As Record argues:
Photographs of terrified children fleeing napalm strikes and statements by American officers in the field that this or that hamlet or town had to be destroyed in order to “save it” played directly into the hands of communist propagandists, who throughout the war appreciated public opinion as the key factor in the war’s outcome.
Attempts to pacify support for Saigon were limited. The Army showed little interest in pacification. However, the Marine Corps did make a serious effort in securing the rural villages and hamlets. The Marines formed Combined Action Platoons (CAPS), which consisted of fifteen marines and thirty-four Vietnamese troops to work alongside the villagers and building intelligence networks. While the Marines’ efforts were successful in the areas in which they were stationed, such cases were few and far between. In 1968, around $14 billion was used on attrition operations compared to only $850 million on pacification programs. As Ruane notes, ‘…the failure to win South Vietnamese ‘hearts and minds’ would prove to be one of the main reasons why such a military victory never materialized.’ Hess supports this statement, as he claims:
Only by concentrating its resources on pacification could the US have won the support of the peasantry and with them, the ideological battle against the Communists. The Americans had the manpower, knowledge, and experience necessary to engage the NLF/VC in the battle of ideas but instead the US squandered its resources on an essentially mindless and counter-productive war of attrition. In sum, American strategy failed to recognize that “hearts and minds” were more important than a “body count.”
As Johnson escalated American involvement in Southeast Asia, a war of opposition was escalating on the streets at home. In 1965 students and faculty at the University of Michigan organized a “teach-in” demonstration. Consequently “teach-ins” spread across campuses with the largest taking place at the University of California, Berkeley, were an estimated 30,000 participated in the event which lasted thirty-six hours in May 1965. By October 1965 the nation had witnessed over sixty protests with some 100,000 people involved. In April 1967 more than 300,000 Americans demonstrated in New York in the largest protest in American history to that point. Simultaneously around 60,000 demonstrators marched in San Francisco with 170 expressing their dissent by burning their draft cards. During October 21 and 22, 1967, the nation’s capital was invaded by antiwar advocates chanting, ‘hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?’ and carrying placards stating ‘LBJ pull out like your father should have done.’ While many did not take to the streets, the mobilization of activists did have a profound impact on policymakers in Washington. Sons and daughters of government officials including McNamara, Nicholas Katzenbach, Paul Nitze, and Dean Rusk openly disapproved of their fathers’ policies, which caused many of the ‘warmongers’ to reassess their views on the war. Herring claims, ‘…the nation appeared on the verge of an internal crisis as severe as the Great Depression of the 1930s.’ Consequently, Zinn argues, ‘the United States lost the war in both the Mekong Valley and the Mississippi Valley.’ 
In an effort to consolidate doubts of the war effort, President Johnson embarked on a public relations campaign. As part of the PR crusade, General Westmoreland was called back to the U.S. in November 1967. In his infamous speech to the National Press Club he purported, ‘We have reached an important point where the end begins to come in view’ and promised of ‘some light at the end of the tunnel.’ Such acclamations were supported by Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who after returning from a diplomatic trip to Saigon, told reporters, ‘we are beginning to win this struggle. We are on the offensive. Territory is being gained. We are making steady progress.’ Furthermore, General Bruce Palmer announced, ‘the war – the military war – in Vietnam is nearly won. The Vietcong has been defeated from Danang all the way down in the populated areas. He can’t get food and he can’t recruit.’ With such optimistic reportage from the government, the American public was deceived into thinking the war was almost won. However, while Washington went on the PR offensive, Hanoi was preparing its own general offensive. On January 30, 1968, on the Lunar New Year, an estimated 84,000 NLF and North Vietnamese troops launched a mass attack on the urban centres of the South. The Communist forces attacked five of the six largest cities, thirty-six out of forty-four provincial capitals, and sixty-four of 242 district capitals. Militarily the Tet Offensive was a disaster for Hanoi. The civilian uprising, which it anticipated, never fermented. Moreover, the North’s army was disabled with heavy losses, with some 40,000 dead compared to the Americans 1,100. Within three weeks Saigon was regained and while the battle over Hue lasted a month, Hanoi did not gain any new territory. However, Tet proved a political and psychological defeat for America. The idea that the war was almost over was shattered. As Moss notes:
…news of the Tet coup de main broke like a thunderclap across America. The fact that the enemy could mount a major military effect all over South Vietnam and catch the allies by surprise shattered all illusions of impending American victory in the war.
As images galvanized across the television screens into the homes of millions of Americans of cities under siege and the U.S. Embassy, being overtaken, horrified viewers perceived an enemy victory. Tom Engelhardt recalled, ‘it was like Vietnam had somehow come all the way into our living rooms.’ Americans witnessed on the screen the execution of a handcuffed Vietcong prisoner who was shot by South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The media that had been generally supportive of the war, after this major offensive began to question officials’ statements. It is said that when Walter Cronkite reported that the war had turned into a ‘bloody stalemate’, Lyndon Johnson commented to his advisors ‘it’s all over.’ Johnson had been conscious of the impact of the media and even had three televisions placed in the Oval office. It was an uncensored war and at its peak there were 500 reporters in the country. Night after night Americans were subject to the true brutality of war. President Johnson in his memoirs claims that sensational reportage of Tet played a crucial role in turning the offensive into a defeat at home. As he recalled:There was a great deal of emotional and exaggerated reporting of the Tet offensive in our press and on television. The media seemed to be in competition as to who could provide the most lurid and depressing accounts… The American people and even a number of officials in government, subjected to this daily barrage of bleakness and near panic, began to think that we must have suffered a defeat.
Tet had a profound impact on American public opinion. A Gallup poll indicated that in November 1967 fifty percent of those surveyed believed the war was making progress, following Tet this fell to thirty-three percent. As Allen argues:
Tet was the turning point in the American war in Vietnam. It had a dramatic effect on domestic U.S. politics. From Tet on the question was no longer when would the United States win the war, but how quickly could the United States get out of Vietnam.
As the conflict was becoming profoundly unpopular at home, the morale of the grunts in the far-off jungles rapidly declined. For commanding officers the war was a tool for promotion. Through a rotation scheme young inexperienced officers could expand their career with a six months or less tour of duty, while the grunts served the full year. As a result combat troops held their superiors with contempt and dissension within the ranks grew. As Bruce Lawlor, a CIA case officer claimed:
The only thing the officers wanted to do was get their six months in command then split back to the States and be promoted and on to bigger and better things. It doesn’t take long for the average guy out in the field to say, “Fuck it!”
The number of ‘fraggings’ ascended with officers constituting the brunt of the victims. Between 1969 and 1971 it was reported that there were 730 incidents of ‘fragging.’ As one soldier put it, ‘I was more at war with the officers there than I was with the Viet Cong.’ Grunts resisted authority by refusing to obey commands and vandalizing military property. They painted ‘UUUU’ on their helmets, an acronym for ‘the unwilling, led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary, for the ungrateful.’ The army’s recruitment slogan ‘Fun Travel Adventure’ became ‘Fuck the Army.’ Drug abuse was rampant with an estimated 65,000 U.S. soldiers using drugs. Such opposition to the war from those who were fighting it did have a detrimental effect on Washington and the outcome of the conflict. As Allen argues:
The United States entered the war in Vietnam with the most powerful military in the world but within a few years this very same military was in a state of disarray, disintegration, and rebellion. This GI rebellion progressively undermined the ability of the United States to defeat the NLF and the North Vietnamese, and was an important factor in Nixon’s decision to draw down troop levels and eventually pull the troops out completely.
Richard M. Nixon was driven by the same misconception of American exceptionalism. He continued a policy of attrition and was determined to not to be the first U.S. president to lose a war. Expanding the conflict, in 1971 alone, more bombs were dropped than in World War II. In the first three years of Nixon’s presidency Americans lost 15,000 servicemen and the South Vietnamese suffered losses of 107,504 between 1969 and 1973. As Americans became demoralized over the war, the antiwar movement became more pronounced with “moratoriums” in Washington announcing the names of the American dead. College campuses came to a standstill with mass waves of protest. Nixon had to concede to a policy of ‘Vietnamization.’ In June 1969 Nixon announced the beginning of a gradual withdrawal of 25,000 troops. Under Vietnamization, the South Vietnamese forces were mobilized with mass supplies and training by the Americans. Thieu ordered the induction of men aged between eighteen and thirty-eight into the military, and by the conclusion of 1970 the South Vietnamese were some 1,100,000 strong. The U.S. supplied the Vietnamese with over a million M-16 rifles and 12,000 M-60 machine guns. Under Vietnamization, the South Vietnamese became one of the strongest military forces in the world. Despite Nixon’s efforts, Vietnamization was cynically perceived as a cover-up for U.S. abandonment. The South Vietnamese, having been arrogantly neglected within the war, failed to show the same determination as Hanoi. Desertion rates remained high and ‘flower soldiers’ paid their commanding officers to avoid combat. While, America was withdrawing its troops, the NLF was still going to be there when the Americans left. Finally, in 1973 a peace agreement was signed, however by 1975 a North Vietnamese flag would be flying over Saigon.
In evaluation, America lost the Vietnam War because of a failure to understand the complexity, the wider context and underlying issues that the war represented. America sought to fit neatly its Cold War policies into a country that for 2,000 years that had opposed foreign intervention and had strong nationalist tendencies. By backing a corrupt and unpopular government it lacked legitimacy to carrying out its goals and feeble attempts at pacification caused it to fight an American war that lacked the mandate of the people of Vietnam. It arrogantly believed that it could fight the conflict through military strength alone and undermined the resolve of what it perceived as an agrarian and backward enemy. As America deployed more and more troops, the U.S. became drawn into a stalemate and with no end in sight and as more grunts returned home in wooden boxes, Americans began to question rationale behind the ‘necessary war.’ A wave of opposition occurred on the home front, which politicians had never experienced before, and with the advent of television and as the media became increasingly cynical of the war effort, Washington found itself largely restricted in its policymaking. The nation had become conscious of the governments deception after Tet and morale among the GIs became exasperated. Dissension was rampant among the grunts and efforts to mobilize a largely displaced Vietnamese force were limited in results. America failed to adopt an effective strategy in the implementation of the war and consequently had to concede to defeat. The loss of Vietnam could probably be aptly evaluated by Omar Bradley’s description of the proposed expansion of the Korean conflict into China when he stated, ‘[it was] the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.’
