You lost in our war, you bring "democracy" to our people, you burn man, woman, children with nalpan because they are "vietcong", you helped the France to kill our people instead of negotiating because you underestimated us. You spent more than 16 billion of your people tax on this war for the thing you called "Stop communism", you drop on a tiny land, across the ocean 7,85 MILLION TONs of boms. Accept it, you have never, ever been a good nation, never. A country which are only 200 years old and has adready joined in 10 major wars wants to teach the world about what they call "peace", "democracy", "freedom"? No thanks. Want this world become a better place to live? Stop wars and teach your people what is history, real hisory, not on History HD or some news, article you read on the Internet. Please, once in your life, get yourself to other countries and read THEIR history, talking to other people have never been so easy in the past thousand years! Why you guys never litsen? For once, do what they want, not what they need, for Chirst!
4
@Dương Ngô
Dear Ngo
Read Huc Doy, "The winning Side" for a different perspective. Note that he is ex NVA.
Regards Jim
5
I was an infantry troop in this general area about 45 miles northwest of Saigon in 1966-67. There were repeated heinious war crimes committed by the Viet Cong, i.e. murdering pregnant Vietnamese women on their way to see US medics. But the mood in our country amongst celebrities and much of the media was that we were wrong and the Commiunists were heroic. We were wrong for breaking Eisenhower's rule of not engeging in a land war in Asia. But the Viet Coing were and remained vicious, inhumane and Stalinistic in their methods and beliefs. That is hardly heroic. I returned in 1994 to Southern Viet Nam. The fear of our "reqiuired" driver was palpable and much in evidence, as he reacted to the constant observance and fear of his (our) minder. I always wondered why there scant few US ground troops ever captured in Viet Nam by the communists. Their recognized treatment of "valuable" prisoners certainly explains why we poor grunts, who had the most frequent contact with the communists, numbered so few in the POW count. Murder so foul.
6
Sir, on behalf of those who are suffering from what communists have been committed over here, I would like to express my appreciation for the effort from you & all other soldiers who had fought & shed your blood to stand against the evil Red devils! You & other vets should be proud of what you guys have believed....
4
When the war ended, tens of thousands of people fled by foot and by sea. The Viet Cong did not set up a democracy, they did not respect many of the things we call "rights" and the people of the then South Vietnam were like those in the north, fighting for *their* country. Those in the South lost.
The US made many mistakes - this however does not make all actions of those who won, right and proper.
It is a fact that the Vietcong (and others) used terror among the many ways they fought the war. Denying facts in the name of your personal "politically correct" ideology is ... a lie.
Who was right or wrong and to what degree, whether we should have been there or under what conditions, etc., are unaffected.
4
we were wrong.
that doesn't mean they were right.
5
"The Viet Cong Committed Atrocities, Too"
Now that is some headline. Comparable to some article in the Hanoi Times being entitled, "Union Soldiers Treated Blacks Poorly, Too." Comparable, that is, if Vietnam had intervened in the U.S. Civil War on behalf of the Confederacy. That didn't happen of course, for the simple reason that Vietnamese intervention in the U.S. Civil War in 1861 would have been no more justified than the actual intervention in the Vietnamese civil war by U.S. armed forces that occurred more than a century later.
The more I read "revisionist" dreck about the Second Indochina War by mostly white American academics (see Mark Moyar's writings for examples of this, if you can stomach the thought), the more I am reminded of the "lost cause" nonsense spouted by white American southerners regarding the 1861-65 war in the United States.
It's honestly enough to make me hope that the U.S. actually does break up into a dozen or more independent countries soon, as Vladimir Putin and probably the elderly Mikhail Gorbachev wish to see happen.
10
If a bull frog had wings it would fly. Silly response.
4
Thank you Heather Stur. Well written, well researched and thoughtful. I spent 19 months in the Mekong delta (1967 - 1968) and we were very much aware of atrocities committed by the Viet Cong. Yes, they could be a ferocious adversary, but they could also commit violence among their own people.
3
History professors can bray all they want about Hiroshima, Dresden, and the spate of Red Army rapes in May, 1945. All horrible, not justified, and important to remember. But in WWII there was one side that was right, and one side that was wrong. Likewise, sure, dot the i's and cross the t's and record the atrocities of the NLF. But there was one side that wanted the colonialists out of their country and another side that proudly engaged in carpet bombing to further colonialism.
4
I love it when people refer to "carpet bombing" in the war. As practiced in WW2 by enormous waves of literally hundreds of bombers night and day to reduce large cities to rubble and kill civilians in large numbers (e.g. Dresden and Tokyo), there was never any such thing in Viet Nam. We dropped 4x the bombs on Hanoi and Haiphong in the Xmas campaign, and by the account of the Hanoi government, caused about 1500 deaths. That's perfect evidence of how careful the bombing was. And BTW, what colonialists were still there after 1956? The French were gone, we weren't there in any presence yet, but the terrorism started, by the communist agents deliberately left behind during partition, and then supplied starting in '59 by more agents coming down the Trail. There was no remote hint of colonialism in US actions, any more than there was in South Korea, where we went to fight the imposition of communism on people who didn't want it.
5
This is a fact that was almost never reported by American media. The Viet Cong and the NVA both used terror as a weapon. Murder, torture and dis figuration of civilians were part of the Communist standard operating procedure. It was effective and used by them to gain and keep control of the rural population. This fact was know to those of us who fought their.
5
A lot of the comments here show a misunderstanding of what war crimes are. War by its nature is horrifyingly barbaric but there are some actions so far outside the scope of civilized behavior that combatants are forbidden to engage in them even if these acts can bring victory in a just cause.
The definition of these acts can change but if you create a "just cause" exemption, you destroy the whole idea of war crimes, since no nation goes to war unless they believe their cause is just, and if you only punish the side fighting in a bad cause, you make clear the only real crime is losing the war
3
As an army military intelligence officer in 1967, I participated in the aftermath of at least two VC acts of terrorism against civilian South Vietnamese. The hundreds of Vietnamese I talked to were far more frightened of the local VC then they were of us.
5
I am deeply disturbed by the printing of this article in the New York Times. I, too, was a Fulbright Fellow in Vietnam, researching the role of women in southern Vietnam. Although I have a mere master's degree, this article presents serious concerns with Dr. Stur's level of scholarship. First, the term "Montagnards" is a derogatory French-era description of a multitude of ethnic groups in Central and Northern Vietnam. Many groups staunchly fought, and others staunchly supported the NLF/VCP. True, Dak Son was a documented atrocity, but the rest of Dr. Stur's analysis of how it represents the behavior or validity of the framework presented by either the NLF/VCP or the Republic of Vietnam is supported by unpublished first-hand accounts Dr. Stur 'heard' in Vietnam, an unpublished memoir and Douglas Pike. Where is evidence from archival research in France or Vietnam? The extensive scholarship of Vietnamese, both domestically and overseas? Do they not have any input beyond vague references to unnamed Vietnamese acquaintances? If we are to take a postcolonial approach to scholarship, should we not be highlighting the research and opinions of the Vietnamese themselves? In a sense, by relying on mainstream American sources, Dr. Stur is mirroring the very neo-colonial approach of 1960s America she attempts to question.
9
Montagnards is a derogatory term? Never heard that about the "mountain people" before, nor that they also fought for the VC/NVA, either.
While Dak Son is but one documented atrocity, the VC massacre of South Vietnamese in Hue far surpasses it with 6000 slaughtered - though our media barely reported it. The VC were vicious animals whose ranks were severely decimated in Tet '68.
Perhaps the lack of published research lies in the fact that so many South Vietnamese faced reeducation camps after the war, and thousands died.
You obvoiusy don't like any American sources, branding them neo-colonial, yet we were the ones who fought and died in attempting to stem communist aggression in South Vietnam. Most of the press chose to portray U.S. and S. Vietnamese forces in a bad light, Congress read their nonsense and funding was all but cut off.
Look at Vietnam today. A communist government that curtails individual liberty at-will, all courtesy of a collective American press and an incompetent Congress.
Most of us who went to Vietnam understand these things, it's obvous that there remains many who would rather not concern themselves with facts.
7
3,000 plus civiulans murdered by the Communbists during the TET offense in Hue City for no military reason except to punish the innocent, who had no where to go.
3
I am French, I have lived in Vietnam, and met many veterans of the French Indochina War. The term "Montagnard" was never derogatory, it means "who lives in the mountains". Many of them were our allies, their culture was strongly opposed to communism. And I doubt that any scholar in Vietnam have the freedom to explore the atrocities commited by the North, no more than to talk about the Hue massacres in 1968, which are well documented.
3
Personally, this title is enough of a reason to retire the rubric. The comments on the other hand, inspire a horror of America that explains the NYC subway bomber. Flabbergasted.
4
You know or care not to know little of history. Regrets that my father landed at about 7:00 a.m. on Omaha Beach, Normandy on June 6, 1944.
During WWII, Lithuanian gangs, under the direction of the Nazis, murder local Jews. When the task was done, the Nazis asked them if they would like to join the Wehrmacht and kill Jews in other countries. Their response: No. we don't travel to other countries to kill people.
People who do travel to other countries to kill people - people who never did a bad thing to them - have no right to criticize any action on the part of the locals, who tried to resist them.
Yes, to be sure, evil occurs during war; but it is embarrassing when Americans, who were the prime mover of the evil commonly called the "Vietnam War", accuse Vietnamese of war crimes. To be more accurate, the conflict should be be referred to as the "American Southeast Asian Expeditionary War", not the Vietnam War.
And one more point: Anyone who says that we were trying to "fix up" a local conflict, is an unrepentant war criminal. We went there because we believed there was offshore oil in the region - cars in 1955 got really bad mileage. We killed to drive.
15
Mr. Zenger, the validity of a criticism does not depend on the innocence of the critic; if it did, no one would be able to evaluate anyone else's behavior. If you are going to discredit Professor Stur's argument, you must challenge her data or her analysis. Otherwise, you are engaging in a form of ad hominem argument.
As for the reasons for American intervention in Vietnam, do you have any proof to support your interpretation? The standard interpretation that fear of Communist expansion drove Johnson's decisions rests on many statements by American leaders. They may have lied, but you need evidence to prove that. Whatever the reason for the intervention, it could not justify the massive loss of life among both Vietnamese and Americans.
6
Funny, but I think Ken Burns missed this part of the story. But then again, the rest of the American Left has missed it as well. Oh, the lies we've been taught.
7
There is a mistake in the second paragraph, where it says: "Its 2,000 residents were Montagnards, an ethnic minority tribe..."
"Montagnards" is not the name of an ethnic minority tribe. It is a general term the French used to describe all minority peoples as it literally means "mountain people". It would be good for the author of this piece to go the extra mile in research and say what ethnic minority the Dak Son residents were a part of.
If that information is not known, the phrase should be edited to say: "Its 2,000 residents were Montagnards that had long resisted...".
6
Wow, what a revelation. Guess I’m on of those liberals who idolized the VC. how’s this. In all those years never once did the VC bring the war home to us. Ever see a suicide bomber from north Vietnam in the NY subway? Bunk.
6
Even though Jimmy Carter refused to pay the promised (by Nixon) reparations, saying that "the destruction was mutual"!!!
1
They supplied pure heroin to troops returning home that in turn caused untold misery and death.
1
You commit a murder. You are a criminal.
It's as simple as that.
That Americans committed crimes over there is completely irrelevant to the culpability of Vietnamese criminals, who are entirely responsible for their own actions and should face justice.
And exactly the same applies to Americans.
That Vietnamese committed crimes over there is completely irrelevant to the culpability of American criminals in Vietnam, who are also entirely responsible for their own actions and should face justice.
It's rare that morality and justice are so clear. When it comes to atrocities like those described in this article, there are NO mitigating factors. The perpetrators are guilty.
The headline is beyond ridiculous and way below the NY Times usual journalistic standards.
6
The Viet Cong won the villages by killing their leaders sand installing their own puppets. The peasants were illiterate and just wanted to own their own land. The rebels were experts in guerrilla warfare and had vast tunnels to hide in.
The Americans won their Revolution with similar tactics when the British ran out of money and volunteers.
3
"The peasants wanted to own their own land" - the land was owned by the landlord class which was the base of the Saigon regime's support. The landlords demanded of Diem that he undo the land reform enacted by the Vietminh, which he did - with hundreds of thousands imprisoned, tortured and murdered in the late 1950s. The Vietminh survivors in the South organized to defend themselves and to convince the peasants to support them, in order to "own their own land." Despite their, at times heavy-handed and brutal tactics, the newly consituted NLF (1960) had the overwhelming support of the overwhelming majority of South Vietnamese - peasants who wanted to own their own land.
5
The "landlord class" of the South? No such class existed as such, nor had one in the North, but that didn't stop the murders of 50K people there or more in the infamous land reform under Ho. Which was so bad that even he had to later acknowledge it as unfortunate. And apparently you missed Diem's land reform in the South, where he distributed tens of thousands of hectares to peasants. The "overwhelming majority" of peasants giving "overwhelming" support to the NLF? Another serious fiction, and after the massacres of Tet '68, support for the VC and NLF dropped sharply, when the invasions came people didn't run to the NVA, they fled in tens of thousands. And then all the land was taken over by the government and no peasants got to own any of it. You really need to read some factual history.
2
This is shameful stuff. The Pentagon tried to convince the American public on the nightly news in the 1960's that it was "winning the war" by touting "kill ratios". According to memory they were generally in the range of from 15 to 1 to 20 to 1. This meant that for every American soldier that died in a particular engagement 15 to 20 enemy soldiers were killed.
By this calculation the loss of 58,000 American soldiers meant the death of close to a million Vietnamese combatants. And for what? The domino theory?
The Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The US stepped in as the new colonialists. This is after Ho Chi Minh and his compatriots had been allied with the US in the effort to defeat the Japanese occupiers during WWII. Some payback.
The violent and unnatural death of anyone (with few exceptions) is a tragedy. To publish an article on the atrocities committed by the Vietnamese during a war of national liberation against colonial domination in which the extraordinary scale of the loss of life (two to three million Vietnamese) is entirely the result of US intervention is itself a disgusting atrocity. It reminds me of nothing so much as the talking-head CIA agent, Alden Pyle, in Graham Greene's The Quiet American.
4
You got some nerve to try and pin the war on the Viet Cong. If the French had left Vietnam peacefully there was not going to be a war of this magnitude. And the biggest horror of that war was the use of Agent Orange, and even today that horror is still being down played.
4
I was so glad we lost in Vietnam, because I thought it would teach us a lesson. How wrong I was. US foreign policy has been one Vietnam after another ever since, ad nauseam . Disgusting, we were and are.
8
In case you failed to notice, the united states is not very good at representing the desires of the majority. We did not all support that war, or the other wars since. Those who did were often victims of propaganda. We do not all think that the peasants, workers and poor of the other countries of the world should be brutally oppressed and killed to protect the interests of the super rich capitalist ruling classes. Please do not paint with such a broad brush. Some Americans recognize that the 'Economic Freedoms' pursued by the Republican party are thinly veiled strategies to enable the exploitation of the poor, to preserve the capitalist status quo.
5
As a 23 year old Marine 2nd Lt operating in the Vietnamese villages in 1965 I concluded the Viet Cong were a bunch of thugs and murderers. When I retired as a Colonel from the Marine Reserve and 1994 I concluded that even more so.
My buddies that have been back tell me we are treated like family.
We had a counterinsurgency program that worked. I'm very proud of what I did and would do it all again.
13
During the American War in Vietnam, more than 2.2 million Vietnamese were killed. 58,220 American military personnel were also killed. The worst atrocity was that the American government instigated it all.
6
Foreign Policy Lesson #1: Do not get involved in another country's civil war so that 58,000 young Americans do not die and 2,000 additional young Americans who are still listed as MIA's (we must now presume they are gone) die for no reason. We should have never gone to VietNam. We shouldn't have gone after Sadam or Quadafhy. Those monsters kept all of their country's monsters under control.
5
I know it upsets the childhood mythology of the sixties but reality always does.
"Even Mr. Q.H., the Communist propagandist, provided a surprisingly sympathetic view of the American military. “Frankly, we exaggerated stories of the brutal activities of the Americans and the numbers of American killed,” he said. “At that time, we needed that talk in order to encourage our comrades on the battlefields.”
Mr. U.V.M., the former guerrilla at Cu Chi, concurred. “I harbored hatred for the U.S. Army because my brother was killed by them,” he said. “But I recognized that American soldiers valued humanitarianism. When they saw our villagers, even our comrades, wounded they cared for all on the spot or sent them to the hospital immediately.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/opinion/as-the-earth-shook-they-stood...®ion=Footer&pgtype=article&version=column&rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fvietnam-67
7
https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061/r...
Vietnam wasn't a war but a criminal campaign started by the Americans. They were taught a very painful lesson by the small general Giap, who was superior to all the US brass. Victims on both sides were ultimately victims of the United States.
6
Many of the comments here follow the line of “they might have been bad but we were worse.” There was no good side in Vietnam and when it comes to atrocities, there is no need for comparisons; horror is horror,no matter who commits it and all the actors bear full responsibility for their own actions.
4
There is the victim, and there is the criminal.
"A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning and violence breaks the chains - let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!"
--Leon Trotsky, "Their Morals and Ours," 1938
5
They have grown up. They are now working for our 1%, taking jobs from US Army veterans in Youngstown.
2
Toward the end, you write, "The United States, South Vietnam, North Vietnam and the Viet Cong were all complicit....", impying that the Viet Cong was a separate entity from North Vietnam if not actually the indigenous South Vietnamese insurgency it claimed to be.
Vo Nguyen Giap, commander-in-chief of the North Vietnamese army during the Vietnam War, confirmed in his postwar memoirs that the Viet Cong had always been a guerrilla formation within his army. It recruited fighters in South Vietnam, but it was a North Vietnamese show under his ultimate command.
America's involvement in the Vietnam War was nonetheless misguided and misrepresented, but like any passage of history it's best viewed after clearing away the propaganda of both sides.
8
Had the US not denied the Vietnamese the vote on unification agreed to in Geneva, had the US not invaded Vietnam taking over the role of colonial power from the French and causing an estimated 3 to 5 million deaths, no atrocities would have been committed by either side.
5
The US did not deny any vote at any time in Viet Nam. Since no one signed the Final Agreement of the Geneva negotiations, there was no remotely legal requirement for Diem to agree to any elections, much less the unsupervised elections that Ho demanded. Diem would have been insane to agree to what would have been a charade.
So did the American patriots against the British sympathizers amongst them. In fact so has every side of every armed conflict in the history of the human race. So what exactly is your point with the "too?" Do you mean that the invaders can absolve themselves a little bit for their own atrocities? You know, everybody does it, so it`s OK for us to do it too. The initiating atrocity happened in 1918 when the Western Powers decided to deny the Vietnamese people the right of self determination in favor of French imperialism. The Vietnamese struggle to throw off that imperial leash, and the United States role in helping to forge and maintain that leash is what you should be informing your readers about. Doing that might help your readers understand how the entire tragedy of 20th century Vietnam could have been avoided and millions of Vietnamese lives spared. Otherwise this sounds like just another apologia for American misconduct.
1
Because "the other side did it too" makes the atrocities we committed acceptable? That's playground logic.
6
The people who want peace, compromise, and reconciliation, or just to be left alone to live their lives, are always the enemy of all those who are fighting an enemy. They have to be done away with, forced to join one side or the other, so the fighters can get down to business and there is no alternative to war.
3
Yes war is good to avoid. Most of the time all sides do awful things. It doesn't make it right. But it does mean it is worth avoiding them. Too bad we lied to start our Vietnam War. Not only did we lie, we pretty well knew it was when we lied. (Oh and lets not forget Iraq). I'll bet if we hadn't lied there would have been a lot fewer atrocities on both sides. And at least a few hundred thousand people would be alive. And we wouldn't still be committing atrocities with our left over agent orange.
11
If you watch The Fog of War, you will find, I think, that there was more self-delusion and ignorance than lying, until you get to Nixon. That is when the dishonesty compounds the stupidity. He sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks and sacrificed the lives of 25,000 Americans and who knows how many Vietnamese to assure his victory in 1972. Only then was he willing to accept the failure that he knew to be inevitable in 1968.
5
On January 21, 1971, a Vietnam veteran named Charles McDuff wrote a letter
to President Richard Nixon to voice his disgust with the American war in
Southeast Asia. McDuff had witnessed multiple cases of Vietnamese civilians
being abused and killed by American soldiers and their allies, and he had
found the U.S. military justice system to be woefully ineffective in
punishing wrongdoers. “Maybe your advisors have not clued you in,” he told
the president, “but the atrocities that were committed in Mylai are
eclipsed by similar American actions throughout the country.” His
three-page handwritten missive concluded with an impassioned plea to Nixon
to end American participation in the war.
The White House forwarded the note to the Department of Defense for a
reply, and within a few weeks Major General Franklin Davis Jr., the army’s
director of military personnel policies, wrote back to McDuff. It was
“indeed unfortunate,” said Davis, “that some incidents occur within combat
zones.” He then. . .
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/my-lai-and-the-real-american-war-i...
3
Yes, but it was their country. There is a big difference between terrorists who fight for their own country, and terrorists who invade from far away--viz. the US.
Why is it that the word "terrorist comes so easily to your tongue with regard to the Viet Song, but, while you admit that Americans used torture, etc., you never call them terrorists?
6
"Yes, but it was their country..." I am an old Vet who was there. I worked at a field hospital. We stabilized the wounded and sent them to larger safer hospitals. What we also did was care for wounded civilians. 50 years later, I still feel the horror and grief of seeing children and women maimed and blown apart by a bomb placed under a movie seat by the Viet Cong because the village did not comply with sending their young to fight with them. Terrorism created such fearful disruption. There were many more instances that we had to witness. What woulld you do if you were there or if you were a mother in Viet Nam then?
11
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. This has been true throughout history.
A "big difference" between this type of terrorist and that type of terrorist?
Really? Take a step back and look at that thought more closely. Do you REALLY believe that?
If this person does action X it's very bad. But if that person does the very same action X it's not so bad.
REALLY?
I'm not talking about comparing murder to self-defense. Those are not the same actions. I'm talking about the terrorizing, torturing and killing of civilians in a war zone. Does it REALLY make a difference who does it?
When a brown person terrorizes, tortures and kills a brown person it's not so bad compared to a white person terrorizing, torturing and killing a brown person.
REALLY?
4
Learning from this article of the terrorist violence by all sides, confirms the fact that war itself is a crime, and yet in the U.S. liberals since the George W. Bush administration (which had Democrat party support for its invasion of Iraq), have advanced a notion of pre-emptive war as a therapeutic response to evil dictators.
In this doctrine’s current iteration, Iran is the target of choice. Syria is a second front for the liberal warriors and “Syrian atrocities” eclipse adequate reporting of the US role in Saudi Arabia's unconscionable war crimes in Yemen.
There is no substitute for peace and for enormous skepticism toward the use of military might to “solve” world problems. The Middle East is immeasurably more chaotic after Mr. Bush’s Iraq war and NATO’s Libyan intervention. The open wound that is Syria continues to be a focus for the armchair warriors to propose US intervention against Assad's government, and Iran, like Iraq before it, has been turned into a monstrous evil that must be invaded by America in order to achieve peace. Making war for peace is generally farcical.
The lessons of Vietnam are largely forgotten. As this Times article makes clear, those lessons include the fact that both sides had dirty hands. The devil rode in both camps, as he so often does in wartime. God willing, the lessons of America’s more recent Iraq war will keep us from starting a war with Iran, or destroying the entire civilian population of N. Korea, as Mr. Trump has threatened.
1
War is hell, but let's not forget who started this carnage. The colonial powers, and the US took up the cudgel. As another poster noted, the bombs we dropped, the defoliants we sprayed, the villagers we killed, through the Phoenix program or indisciminate bombing runs, well, we kinda upset any existing order that existed before we get there...and lets not forget how much bomb tonnage we dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. More than in WW2. The VC were surely savage and brtual, but so were we.
7
Nothing in this article is a surprize since nobody has ever seriously considered the Viet Cong to represent the shining light of democracy. The US, Cong, ARVN and NVA all tortured and killed civilians in many horrible creative ways. The US role was unique since we were the foreign invader in a civil war supporting an unpopular puppet regime. Most interesting is the extensive use of pejorative term "terrorist" which if it has any objectiv meaning must be applied to us and our allies in that war.
6
I fail to see the point of this article other than as an apology for the war crimes committed by the United States in Southeast Asia. Something like two or three million Vietnamese lost their lives. The legacy of agent orange and other toxins is still producing birth defects and cancer over 40 years after the cessation of hostilities. Not one penny in compensation was ever paid to the Vietnamese.
The CIA assassination program, Operation Phoenix, murdered between 26,000 and 41,000. Out of the millions killed what percentage can be attributed to US forces and what percentage were atrocities committed by the NLF or the North Vietnamese military? This is sick stuff.
7
The level of birth defects in Viet Nam has never been unusual, and in fact is lower than in Cambodia next door. There are only tiny remnants of dioxin left in the four former airbases used by the US. There are no elevated blood levels of dioxin in the VN population, and the overall health levels in the North, where there was no spraying, is no better than that of the South. Many millions of dollars have been contributed in Viet Nam to supposed AO victims, and many millions more are being spent by the US to clean up the remaining areas where the defoliants were handled. But most of the money ends up diverted to the corrupt government, and only a fraction ever gets to sick people. I've visited supposed AO related orphanages, and they get no aid from Hanoi, but are told to tell all visitors all the kids are AO victims, when that is clearly false.
7
Documentation? By all accounts of international observers, AO poisoning continues to be a problem in the South, as well as unexploded bombs. Nixon, in the 1973 Paris Peace Accords promised to pay reparations. The US under both Democratic and Republican administrations, has consistently refused to abide by that promise.
2
You keep asking everyone for documentation, but never supply any. OK, birth defects, check the March of Dimes international survey of birth defects in the world, find Viet Nam in the center of the distribution, with a much lower rate than Cambodia. AO poisoning, how about you supply documentation from an international body on the level of dioxin in the tissues of Vietnamese? There isn't any, and simply claiming that all cancers and birth defects in the whole nation are related to AO is utterly bogus.
2
Oh my goodness, the author has told us that the North Vietnamese committed atrocities too.
Even if everything the author said is correct, I still believe that the US was dead wrong in IndoChina and I would cast my lot with the protesters who chanted "Ho, Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win."
A few things the author may have overlooked.
1) Hundreds of thousands of innocent IndoChinese were killed by US bombs from 1964 to 1973.
2) North Vietnam never threatened the US, was almost ten thousand miles away from California and its population and industrial production was to ours as a mouse is to a lion.
3) We routinely poured napalm, or liquid fire, on enemies and civilians alike, burned down villages, and made huge swaths of the nation free fire zones where we killed anything that moved.
4) The killing was done in Vietnam, not in America. Since Vietnam was threatened while America enjoyed luxury, I would grant the Vietnamese much more latitude in the way it fought.
5) All Wars are full of atrocities. Civilians have a tamed, domesticated view of war which truly diverges from reality.
For example, Roger Hilsman, the undersecretary of state for Far Eastern affairs under JFK, said that in World War Two his men once killed some Burmese for allegedly aiding the Japanese. Hilsman said that we Americans did not know if the Burmese were guilty, but we wanted to terrorize and instill deference and obedience among the population.
5
It would be helpful if
the New York Times series on Vietnam
spent time on Le Duan,
who was the Dictator of North Vietnam from 1960 on
and had the deluded belief that the people
of South Vietnam were ready to rise up in
revolt against the South Vietnamese Government.
It Duan, more than anyone else,
who was responsible for the Vietnam War.
8
Any military deaths in Vietnam during the war were completely the responsibility of the U.S. government -- who was fighting a brutal, merciless war motivated by nothing more than imperial stratagem.
6
Um, would there have been a "government-controlled hamlet in Phuoc Long Province in 1967" if not for US interference? The South Vietnamese "government" was a US puppet.
I feel sorry for the inhabitants of Dak Son, just as I feel sorry for all the other Vietnamese who died, were injured, or lost family and friends on account of a US compulsion to disrupt any sort of democratic evolution in Vietnam because it might trigger a "Domino Effect". Which is to say, a "Domino Effect" of Democracy in formerly colonial Southeast Asia.
Living in Southern Mississippi, Ms. Stur may not have much experience of democracy, but the rest of us are grateful for it and happy to share it with other nations, at their own desire and under their own conditions. In contrast, the US war in Vietnam was an exercise in PREVENTING the development of democracy in a former French colony.
But in Southern Mississippi, that might pass for progress.
7
Nicely glossed.
2
Was this conclusion ever in question?
4
75 miles northeast of Saigon shouldn't be close to the Cambodian border. I think they must have meant northwest of Saigon. Anybody else agree?
7
Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's Vietnam War series contained some impressive interviews with North Vietnamese leaders who have begun to question their own strategies and tactics. These former generals now think that Ho Chi Minh would have eventually been able to achieve unification politically. His top generals, however, were impatient with Ho's peace efforts and drafted hundreds of thousands of young men who would have been better off going to school (the casualties were enormous). These same generals sent their own sons to the USSR to study.
10
Here is my introduction to my infantry company in the 25th Division in the fall of 1969. First the top sergeant had us write a scripted letter home. He said the company was tired of us FNG’s getting killed before our first letter got home. It made him look bad.
Then he talked about our reason for being there. It was not to ensure the freedom of the Vietnamese or to stop the spread of communism. We were there to “kill gooks, now there are good gooks and bad gooks but you’re here to kill gooks”. That certainly didn’t make us very careful about who we shot at or how we treated the Vietnamese. Of course the VC and NVA committed atrocities and we did as well. Guerrilla warfare is particularly violent but we traveled halfway around the world to inflict it on a country we knew nothing about.
11
The Phoenix Program was designed, coordinated, and executed by the CIA with the assistance of US Army intelligence collection units. The CIA described it as "a set of programs that sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong." The two major components of the program were Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) and regional interrogation centers. PRUs would kill or capture suspected Viet Cong members and civilians who were thought to have information on Viet Cong activities. Those captured were taken to interrogation centers and tortured in an attempt to gain intelligence on Viet Cong activities. Phoenix Program personnel killed between 26,000 and 41,000 suspected Viet Cong operatives, informants and supporters. (Wikipedia - Phoenix Program)
Methods of torture inflicted upon captured women by CIA and Army intelligence personnel included rape and rape followed by murder. A criminal psychopath, who came to be known as the East Area Rapist-Golden State Killer, first made his presence known in northern California in 1976 by terrorizing and committing the rapes of dozens of young women and girls. He also murdered a young married couple before moving to Southern California in 1979 where he committed ten more murders and several rapes. This serial rapist and killer (crimes from 1976 -1985) has never been identified. Law enforcement has steadfastly refused to investigate a theory that this individual may have been a former member of the Phoenix Program.
3
Atrocities?
Yes, the Viet Cong committed atrocities on their fellow Vietnamese. They did it in their own country.
Funny how we don't call killing millions by aerial bombardment an atrocity, no less a wedding party by drone. We certainly don't call it the terrorism that it is.
15
Carl Lee, war is hell. And that includes what this country has to do to protect its citizens. Mistakes are made, but that is war.
3
I have had the opportunity to talk to many Vietnamese in the United States and in North and South Vietnam. In Vietnam, the war is referred to as the American War. Many Vietnamese have told me that average Vietnamese citizens have been able to "let go" of the American War while US citizens still suffer from the war bevause they can't let go.
5
because the result did not reflect the delusions some citizens have about this country.
2
I've never seen the North Vietnamese or the Viet Cong romanticized. Ignored sometimes, but mostly portrayed as ruthless killers not afraid to make the jungle a nightmare for the Allied soldiers in a misbegotten war made by civilian leaders, not by them.
3
We didn't belong there. Not our country. Had we not been there, the war would have been over much sooner, with less suffering all around. Does the author really want to put this incident in the scale with the systematic decade-long destruction wreaked by America's military forces on the land and in the air, with carpet bombing, agent orange, and anti-personnel bombs? Do you really want us to believe that an otherwise "democratic" S. Vietnamese regime turned to repression only in response to VC terrorism?
Is this "corrective" piece really supposed to make us feel better about My Lai, etc, etc.
6
The corrective piece is trying to make the Vietnam war less of a narcissistic thought process for Americans, both pro-war and anti-war. It's not supposed to make you feel better or worse. It's not about you. It's finally starting, in the academic and journalistic world, to be about the Vietnamese.
2
When and where was there
"Carpet Bombing" in the Vietnam War ?
1
Oh I see, just the incontestable objective truth. Sorry, friend, even corrective pieces need to be put into perspective. Tired of the wretched academic equivalency that attempts to obscure what we did there. That's what I most care about as an American citizen.
Douglas Eugene Pike, foremost scholar on the Vietnam War and the Viet Cong (Texas Tech University) and director of the Indochina Archive (UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY) had this to say about the consequences of the Communist Victory in Vietnam.
“Even by the most cautions estimate, more Indochinese died violently since the end of the Vietnam War than during the war itself, perhaps by two million . . . . Human suffering has been on an unprecedented scale, far worse than the wartime days.”
8
It sounds like your professor is including the Khmer Rouge catastrophe in his "Indochinese" conclusion. That would complicate the analysis.
3
Documentaition? Aren't we tired of all these rumors and urban legends unsubstantiaed by concrete evidence??
3
Dennis Brasky - Douglas Pike's book, "PAVN People's Army of Vietnam" provides references and documentation. It's available on Amazon. Also read Pike's "History of Vietnamese Communism".
While I was in Vietnam as an infantry soldier in 1968-69 I was fortunate never to see or hear a credible account of any atrocities on either side. Nevertheless, I'm sure they occurred. Has there ever been a war without atrocities?
Of course the atrocity is war itself. The author is right that the Vietnamese villagers were besieged on all sides by violence from both sides and were defenseless against it.
While some Vietnamese were patriotically motivated, in my experience the common villagers could not have cared less about who ran the government. They just wanted to raise their crops, feed their families, and live in peace. To them, us carrying our M-16's, mortars, and machine guns through their fields and villages was atrocity enough.
16
Jim Hugenschmidt gets right to the point like a true prophet: the atrocity is war itself.
During the March to the Sea during the Civil War in America, General William Sherman commented, "War is Hell". For some odd reason most people want to think he was exaggerating or speaking in hyperbole. No. He was stating the blunt fact and truth. Heaven and Hell are not somewhere else or in some other time. They are Here and Now. You can have Heaven here and now or you can have Hell, right here and now. So what will it be?
4
There is nothing that can be more empirically established than the depravity of the heart of man.
It's ongoing. It hasn't stopped.
3
This is old news for anyone who has seriously studied the Vietnam War. It was a horror that didn't have to happen. We made it happen, so ours is the supreme responsibility.
2
The horror would have been the same, only without American involvement. French and American colonialism in the region ensure the south would have suffered immensely either way. The Khmer Rouge take over in neighboring Cambodia also would have happened regardless of American involvement. Our involvement only made us directly responsible. If we had done nothing, we would have revisionists arguing that our lack of involvement led to atrocities for which we now must take supreme responsibility. All we did was add Americans and more Vietnamese, particularly North Vietnamese, directly to the death toll. See criticism of Rwanda, despite the impossibility of putting troops on the ground in any meaningful, organized manner, as an example of indirect "letting" it happen.
3
Before Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia for about 18 months before he sent in US troops in May 1970 (behind the backs of Congress and most of his Cabinet - an impeachable offense), the Khmer Rouge was an insignificant force. The bombing wreaked havoc on the Cambodian social structure, leaving the KR as the only opposition force. Only in thei environment were they able to become a major player.
Maybe. When my father was there in 1970 he saw Cambodian government soldiers drilling with broomsticks. Meanwhile the Khmer Rouge out in the countryside were armed with the AK-47s and the latest communist-bloc weaponry, courtesy of the North Vietnamese army. And if the Khmer Rouge ever lost a skirmish to the Government the North Vietnamese would assist them to get the territory back. Maybe the US bombing made some people support the Khmer Rouge. (But remember, they were evil long before 1975. My father brought back from his 1970 trip to Cambodia broken x-ray plates that Khmer Rouge soldiers had exposed when they captured a provincial hospital.) But the bombing also kept them from seizing complete control of the country. Final point. Many activists who opposed the US being in Vietnam and who supported the VC, also supported the Khmer Rouge. And I don't just mean Noam Chomsky.
All wars bring atrocities, from both sides. War IS an atrocity.
Were it not for the presence of US troops, who, of course, committed their own atrocities, these atrocities would not have taken place, and the war would have ended much sooner. In fact, had the west, including the US, given Ho Chi Minh a fair hearing for his nationalist struggle against colonialism in the aftermath of WWI, and again after WWII, none of this horror would have been necessary.
Supposedly, FDR had planned to keep the French and Dutch out of their East Asian colonies when WWII ended. He didn't live that long, and did not communicate with Truman, on this or other matters. More's the pity. So much carnage might have been avoided.
And when the US invaded Iraq, the military knew what the gruesome results would be. The atrocities didn't have names yet, like Abu Graib, but generals with experience in Vietnam could have drawn you a picture. Young, American, weaponized recruits whose only desire was to survive would see these differently colored, different sounding Iraqis all as impediments to the achievement of their war aim, getting home in one piece.
And from that comes the empowerment of Al Qaeda in Iraq and Isis throughout the Middle East. Another generation of children who hate the people who destroyed their childhood and their families.
5
Communist forces all over the world used atrocities and murder plenty. Plenty. Since its inception, communist governments had to resort to murder, etc.
8
Professor RJ Rummel, the world's foremost expert on democide, had this to say about VIETNAMESE CIVILIANS KILLED
- Table 6.1a for the period 1960-1975, TOTAL CIVILIAN WAR DEAD (LINE 193), midcase 663,000
- Many civilians were killed by the communist. For example "The estimated range of refugees killed in one case (line 454) may seem relatively high but is probably conservative. Of the 200,000 refugees that fled the Highlands offensive by the North in March 1975, only 45,000 made it to Tuy-Hoa. MANY OF THE 155,000 MISSING WERE KILLED BY NORTH VIETNAMESE TROOPS"
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM
1
I guess that Robert McNamara was secretly soft on communism, since he used a figure of four million dead Vietnamese.
"The United States, South Vietnam, North Vietnam and the Viet Cong were all complicit in the imprisoning, torturing and killing of Vietnamese civilians." Shocked! Shocked that men across cultural and national divides all committed atrocities, as though its not the soul and bones of the species.
4
What North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and Viet Cong armies did to their civilian population will ultimately be judged by the people of Viet Nam. What we did to them, including the incentives we provided them to make war for our interests, is for our conscience to judge.
The ultimate judgement by The people of Vietnam may never happen; history there is not written by impartial historians, it is written by the ruling class. So it goes.
Lucky for us, we don't have a ruling class!
The people of Vietnam sure do!
We weren't willing to fight at night, therefor they owned the land and villages far more than we did. After the battles of Khe Sanh and Hamburger Hill we abandoned the territory we had fought so hard over. We were more interested in body count than holding territory, it's not surprising the result was they ended up holding the land.
2
When the author generalizes by writing "the Dak Son massacre represents the no-win situation ordinary Vietnamese villagers were in during the conflict.' she misrepresents the nature of the conflict, although I expect there may have been the odd village that preferred French and its replacement colonialist, the USA. As to the Montagnards they were enlisted by the CIA to fight in its behalf, thus they made themselves liable.
5
Michael roloff,
The vast majority of Vietnamese did not want to live under a dictatorship.
Especially like the one in the North that destroyed two generations of youth.
Are you saying the Montagnards had no right to be free -
to not live under a Communist Dictatorship ?
2
Here's bulletin, Heather. Colonists committed "atrocities" on the Redcoats. The British committed "atrocities" on the Irish. The French Revolution committed "atrocities" on the nobility. In the case of Vietnam, WE invaded THEIR country 'cause we didn't like how they ran things. Small wonder they objected. Heather's abilities as a history prodfessor are massively over-rated.
17
Wimsy you are correct, and even the holy Ken Burns forgot to mention, in his seemingly endless documentary, that when the Americans entered Vietnam we inherited all the animosity earned by the French over a century. And the odd thing about it is if one goes to Hanoi today, everyone is welcoming and hospitable. I wonder how Americans would treat Vietnamese tourists?
1
From the historically comfortable distance of 50 years, it is easy to forget (if not outright ridicule) the truth that existed at the time: totalitarian Communism was spreading by force of arms at the expense of democracy and human rights. Have we forgotten that the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968? After much consideration, research, and discussion, I am satisfied that we fought in Vietnam for two reasons. First, to attempt to halt the spread of Communism is Southeast Asia. Second, to show the leadership of the USSR that Americans could and would fight and die to oppose their proxy states.
The connection that is extremely significant historically, but which I never hear made is that about 5 years after the last US troops left Vietnam, the USSR attempted a similar demonstration in Afghanistan, which turned into a bloody mistake that, having demonstrated the hollowness of the USSR, led directly to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
There is much more to these past 50 years than facile restatements of shallow and untested analysis.
4
How do Americans treat Vietnamese refugees from the uninhabitable horror they fled in the wake of the inevitable American defeat?
Many incidents occurred on an individual level. CIA lie detector John Sullivan, who tested more VC, NVA and South Vietnamese than anyone else in his 4 years recalled how US Special Forces Sgt Anthony Batastogne about an incident of torture to a capture VC woman by US forces. " We stuck field telephone wires in her box, cranked the handle, and watched her go nuts. She ended up telling us where some VC supposedly were, but when we got there, they ambushed us and we lost 3 men." Batastogne was later killed on his second tour. John Sullivan's book Of Spies and Lies documents his shift from tacit support before he arrived and coming to the realization and of hopelessness and futility of the cause. Lots of corruption and double-dealing by SV army and govt officials.
1
"[T]hey found more than 200 dead bodies, most of which were corpses of women and children." Suppose not a single one was a woman or child. You still would have had the gruesome deaths of over 200 defenseless human beings. I'm not sure what is the point of this sort of gratuitous detail, except to imply that some people have less inherent worth than others.
1
The point? Just as you say: the life of an adult male is of less worth than that of a female or an under-age male. That's a PC fact, not an implication.
1
Everyone commits atrocities in war. The real question is why were we in their country.
8
To stop the spread of communism, intimidate China and as a proxy war against Stalin. Not good enough reasons for you but to the people in charge back then it was. You might want to look into why China didn't participate like they did wit h Korea.
1
....Because the USA has now given China hundreds of $billions and they have their own Power Issues now?
Is this similar to USA giving the Middle East Governments, Terrorists and Crazies money and weapons also? I'm curious Mr. G. Seems like arming and financing violent people and tribes around the world, kind of comes back to bite us....
2
Civilians suffer the most in war. Always. Atrocities are perpetrated by all sides in all wars. Vietnam is no exception.
5
During the Battle of Gettysburg, there were 51,000 casualties, including 7,000 killed in action. Total civilian casualties? One. One civilian casualty. Even at the dawn of the age of mechanized warfare, direct civilian combat casualties were very rare.
Thank Kapitanleutnant Walther Schwieger, who killed 1,198 civilians aboard Lusitania, for opening the age of "unrestricted warfare on civilians."
The United States has tried harder than any other 21st Century combatant to return to a morality of warfare where targetting civilians is unacceptable.
Charles Becker - "The United States has tried harder than any other 21st Century combatant to return to a morality of warfare where targetting civilians is unacceptable." Firebombing of Tokyo, and Dresden? Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Napalm? Agent Orange? Depleted Uranium? Central American death squads?Waterboarding? Rectal inhalation?
1
OK. The violence described was wrong. But it doesn't expunge away or even balance the horrific evil inflicted on the Vietnamese by the US in the name of some distorted thing called the domino theory. Now Vietnam is a trading partner. The recent PBS series on the war had me reading again. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of sorties by B 52s, fighter bombers, helicopter gunships dropping napalm, thousand pound bombs, agent orange. The Phoenix program with its mass assassinations. Six hundred thousand American troops and three hundred thousand South Vietnamese against a nation whose population was smaller than many of our states. It will never go down well with Americans, but we probably witnessed the greatest revolutionary victory in history. The courage and endurance of the Vietnamese against first the French and then the Americans makes George Washington and Valley Forge look like small stuff.
3
". . . the greatest revolutionary victory in history" ? The communists in Russia dodn't do too badly either, a hundred years ago. As to whether a revolution iltimately benefits the people in whose name it is carried out, well, that's a different question.
"The Viet Cong Committed Atrocities, Too"
No kidding!
This must be a big surprise to Jane Fonda and the Left who supported Communist North Viet Nam.
5
Early in Ken Burn's series there is a brief mention that De Gaulle warned that if France was not allowed to reclaim Vietnam as a colony it might fall to the communists as well. If this is true it was huge. Did De Gaulle bluff Truman into the ensuing disaster? I would have liked to learn more, much more, about this. The political side and, as is alluded to in the article, the horrible no win predicament of the Vietnamese peasantry don't get near the focus they should.
I visited Vietnam in November for the first time. I had no preconceptions. I found them to be charming. The war is first and foremost a Vietnamese story although from what I could tell they just want to move on.
1
Many of these responses are focusing on the American led atrocities in Vietnam, as if that was the first occurrence. We committed atrocities in WW2 on the German and Japanese civilians in firebombing Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, etc. torching tens of thousands of non combatants, who died horrible deaths. Oh, and the 2 atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well. How far back do you want to go? How about the massacre of old men women and children at Wounded Knee? Perhaps the gifting of the smallpox infected blankets to the Native Americans? Whipping African American slaves to death? Lynchings of African Americans? The murder of Emmitt Till? Vietnam was far from the first atrocities Americans have committed on other peoples. I would like to believe it's the last.
2
''montagards'' french for people in the mountains call themselves the hmung. they faced immediate genocide when the US just left their allies behind ..knowing they would be killed if they stuck around about 5,000 of these brave people started fighting their way out of vietnam about 240 made it out ..they were met by americans with whom they had fought and sponsered by them for immigration to the US
The hmong were only one of the many tribes criss-crossing the mountains of Southeast Asia and southern China that go by the general (and some think inaccurate) umbrella name of montagnards in the formerly French colonies.
The Hmong were living as a distinct ethnic group in China until the 1800’s, when they migrated south. The people who already lived in Indochina were not pleased to have new people moving in, especially since the Hmong had a stone-age culture. The more sophisticated Indochinese saw the Hmong as crude hills men.
There has been strife and clashes between the Hmong and Indochinese ever since. This article points out that the Hmong were resisting the Vietcong even before the Americans arrived.
After the war, tens of thousands of Hmong were allowed to move to the U.S. on the premise that the Vietnamese would attack them for having aided the Americans. But, the reality was that the Indochinese had never welcomed or fully accepted the Hmong. That we joined the war, and worked with the Hmong, did not radically alter their relationship with the Indochinese. The Indochinese had always hated them.
The Hmong wanted to leave a region where they have never been accepted, and the Indochinese were happy to see them go.
Just as the Hmong had trouble acclimating to the more sophisticated Indochinese cultures, they have had trouble adjusting to ours. It would have been better had the U.N. been able to mediated between the Hmong and the countries in the region, to a point where they were all willing to respect each other and live in peace.
We need to stop seeing our country as the best place for every unwanted ethnic group to settle.
As Patricia in Pasadena, Californai states, Ho Chi Minh did not start out as a Communist. In fact, to backtrack, he was also a hero in WW2 to many American and British airmen who had been flying "over the hump" in supply lines from India. Some crash-landed from lack of fuel, or were shot down by the Japanese forces in Burma. Ho Chi Minh rescued those airmen and kept them safe to be returned to friendly lines.
After the war, Minh, who had an American education, began the resistance in French Indo-China. He begged Eisenhower, his friend, for help in ridding them of the ruthless puppet dictator in Saigon. But Eisenhower sided with the French because of our mutual membership in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). Minh was left to seek help from the Chinese and Russians.
The Battle of Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954 was a major defeat for the French and that is when Eisenhower decided to start the flow of military "advisors" to the region in support of the French. From that point on, that revolution by the Viet Minh became a rallying cry against what was called "the domino theory," each country in the region would fall into Communist control if the United States did not help the Saigon government to resist and win against the revolutionaries.
By the time Eisenhower handed the conflict over to his successor, John Kennedy, American involvement was assured. Neither Kennedy nor Johnson wanted this war in the beginning. But the fog of war rolled in anyway until 1975.
4
Kennedy was a staunch anti-communist (missile gap anyone?). He increased the number of US advisers in Vietnam 10 fold. It's part of the Camelot myth that he wanted out.
1
Imagine if the Versailles (Paris) Peace Conference (1919) had approved US President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, that French Indo China got the independence that Ho so diligently lobbied for and that Ho was not reduced to going to the nascent USSR to be heard...
To read Points 5 - 13 of Wilson's 14 Points and to realize what opportunities were missed and what came later as consequences…
3
Yes they did. The recent Ken Burns documentary on Vietnam makes that fact abundantly clear but their atrocities in no way minimize or magnify those committed by U.S. or South Vietnamese troops, their commanding officers, or their political leaders. Tar all with the same brush.
2
War is never kind. The violence, no matter what the motivation, unleashes the worst (and some of the best) in human beings. There are heroes who sacrifice themselves for the good of their fellow soldiers and even for enemy civilians. But often the animal nature of humans takes over, and atrocities become "justifiable." The better solution is to stop stepping up our military interventions and work on diplomacy and economic injustices around the world, to make war a rarity, rather than the first solution.
1
Even this "reckoning" falls short. Revolution was just another word for a nationalist movement that predates Communism with the ethnic Vietnamese moving in to dominate other ethnic and sectarian groups in southern Vietnam. Saigon and the surrounding southern Vietnam were once part of the Khmer kingdom of Cambodia, for example. Chinese immigrants (who became the boat people) and Catholic Vietnamese had no place in a Vietnam dominated by the North's ethnic Vietnamese. Moreover, the North's commitment to a military overthrow of the South condemned far more Vietnamese to death than any and all atrocities committed by the Viet Cong. Left-leaning historians and journalists focus exclusively on American mistakes, predictably overlooking the commitment to violence by the North Vietnamese and who had the backing of the Soviet Union (aka Russia) and Red China who supplied the weapons for North Vietnam's campaign of violence and terror.
2
In the late 1950s, Hanoi wanted to concentrate on rebuilding what the French had destroyed and demanded that the revolutionaries in the South come up with some modus vivendi with Diem so as to avoid provoking US retaliation, but Diem pursued a policy of extermination, forcing the former Vietminh in the South to organize a defense and demand that Hanoi support them. Finally they did in 1960 with the establishment of the NLF. And BTW - the Catholics in the North fled en masse because of a CIA disinformation campaign, telling them that they faced torture and death if they stayed. Psycholgists would call this "projection" on the CIA's part because this is precisely what THEY did with the Phoenix Program.
Really ?
After South Vietnam capitulated the communist regime committed egregious abuse of human rights on the people they "liberated".
Even today the regime imprisons dissidents and malcontents whose only fault is to disagree with the government.
15
None of your (or my) business. Vietnam belongs to the Vietnamese.
2
Reconsider your empty slogan. Since millions of Vietnamese were forced to flee the country AFTER the war and perhaps millions more were killed, tortured, or brutally treated within their country, you can hardly say that Vietnam belongs to "the Vietnamese."
1
uxf - after the war "perhaps millions more were killed, tortured, or brutally treated within their country," - evidence please! I'll save you the time - while a one-party state, there is NO evidence of anything like Soviet gulags or mass expulsion to the countryside as in China's mid '60s "Cultural Revolution."
People did note this at the time, especially people trying to excuse or deny U.S. and South Vietnamese wrongdoing. The Viet Cong were not, however, fighting in the name of the American people.
5
This issue, if not this particular massacre, is addressed at least somewhat in Ken Burns' film. Everybody was bad. That doesn't excuse American atrocities when they occurred.
12
Ho Chi Minh didn't start out as a Communist. It was French colonial intransigence that sent him to into the arms of the hard core revolutionary Leninists. And American paranoia over falling dominos kept him there. What a tragedy. It didn't have to go that way.
26
patricia.....America has a long history of doing this sort of thing. castro approached the usa after taking power--and getting rid of an American puppet--and was rebuffed. the usa was responsible for installing the shah of iran and didn't that turn out well.....let's not talk about backing or actively working to install, right wing dictatorships in chile, argentina, brazil, central America and Greece which is known as the cradle of democracy.
4
Ho Chi Minh reached out to America first. He thought President Wilson's rejection of colonialism would gain him the support of the U.S., but of course, Wilson's was only against colonizing white people. After appealing the US, he turned first to French socialists, and then to French communists, who treated him with respect. After WW II, he helped the US against Japan and appealed again to the US. While Truman could support the communist Tito in his effort to be independent of the USSR, he could not imagine supporting a communist nationalist whose skin was yellow. More important to help the French regain their colony. The whole Vietnam tragedy began with Truman and Dean Acheson, followed by Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, and then three more presidents. They could have stopped at anytime. But they all colluded and America lost whatever moral high ground it possessed after its Indian massacres, its treatment of Black people, and its land grabs from Mexico. Most Americans are good people, but it is hard to face up to our bloody past.
2
William Taylor, while we have not always acted up to our ideals, there is no reason Mexico should own what has become the southwestern region of the U.S. Before the Europeans arrived, the Aztecs, the Mayas, and Mexico’s other indigenous groups did not live in this region. They lived in what is now called Mexico.
The ancestors of Native Americans lived in California, Arizona, and our other southwestern states. Spain stole the southwest from the Native Americans who lived there. When Mexico claimed independence from Spain, it really should not have laid claim to the southwest.
We know very little of Latin American history. Most of us are unaware that France took over Mexico, and would probably have fought to keep it had the U.S. not invoked the Monroe Doctrine. So, yes, we did take the southwest from Mexico, but Mexico should never have laid claim to it in the first place. What-is-more, Mexico proper might have remained a French colony, had it not been for us.
The Viet Cong committed atrocities TOO. Is that a submission that Americans committed atrocities in Vietnam murdering and burning Vietnamese, man, woman and child i.e. anything moving? Two wrongs do not make a right. The Vietnamese suffered like the Rohingyas of today, the same MO. Yet the Vietnamese won and we lost!
12
What Vietnamese won? Name one.
You don't say? Who would have thought it? I'm totally shocked...
8
I laughed when I read the headline "The Viet Cong Committed Atrocities Too" because that never was important to me.
What was important to me was that I was brought up to believe that American troops (with a few exceptions, unavoidable by virtue of human nature) would never, ever participate in an atrocity against civilians or even against enemy troops. Such a belief was part of my belief in American exceptionalism.
My belief was wrong. In fact, it appears that America has become (and is even getting worse) the type of country that we once despised - using force and duplicity to get our way, run by egomaniacs who are adored by racist nationalists.
May God save America from the Republican elitist fascists who are taking over our great land.
56
You laughed when you read about Viet Cong atrocities. Wow, you have a great sense of humor...
1
Dear Dennis Martin,
You're right that America isn't some exceptional sainted place. Particularly right that Trump and his ilk are fascists at heart. But we're nowhere near a fascist state yet, and it looks like Trump is too incompetent, incapable of focus, and unintelligent to get that done.
However, do you know what nations commit more awful war crimes than we do? Nearly every nation that goes to war. Russia, China, Germany, Japan, Sudan, Egypt, Syria, Nigeria, really you name it, everyone that gets involved in war is far more brutal and engages in more massacres of civilians than the U.S.. So actually, the U.S. is exceptional among warlike nations, in that we commit less brutality than everyone else. Naturally I'm leaving out nations that never go to war, like Andorra, Swaziland, and so on.
11
So, do you have some type of moral calculus that would tell me exactly how more evil these other countries are?
3
At what point did the United States, South Vietnam, North Vietnam or the Viet Cong ever consider the needs of the Vietnamese people? I suggest never is close to the correct answer. They, like us, acted out of lofty self-interest rendering whatever needed to be done to or not done for the civilian population a justifiable. Sadly, very little has changed.
19
There was a VC Montagnard battalion the 120th I believe. Some of its rifle companies were assigned to protect the NVA 107 Air Defense Battalion which had infiltrated into the Son Re Valley in June 67 equipped with 12.7 AA guns.
Of course all of this could have avoided if the French had not insisted on keeping their colony after either of the World Wars and we had not aided and abetted them.
Give Ho the independence he asked for back in 1919 and again in 1945 and the entire mess doesn't happen.
45
Perhaps, but Ho Chi Min was a communist and to date, ALL communist regimes practiced and/or practice terror. Yes, colonialism was a terrible thing and the French committed crimes against humanity, but it is doubtful that any communist regime would have been free of similar crimes.
17
Communist, fascist, democratic, whatever. Samo, samo. Terror, like beauty, is in the eye of the oppressed and the oppressor.
1
"Give Ho the independence he asked for back in 1919 and again in 1945 and the entire mess doesn't happen."
To my mind, that is the essential truth of Vietnam.
And freedom-loving western democracies maintaining brutish colonial control over sovereign nations is the essential hypocricy.
2
(Lem is the Vc fighter executed in the famous Pulitzer prize winning photograph) Around 4:30 A.M., Lém led a sabotage unit along with Viet Cong tanks to attack the Armor Camp in Go Vap. After communist troops took control of the base, Lém arrested Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Tuan with his family and forced him to show them how to drive tanks.[3] When Lieutenant Colonel Tuan refused to cooperate, Lém killed Tuan, his wife and six children and his 80-year-old mother by cutting their throats. There was only one survivor, a seriously injured 10-year-old boy.[3]
18
So the drivers of those "Viet Cong tanks" couldn't teach Lem to drive a tank? Not claiming that Lem didn't deserve what he got, but that story just doesn't make sense.
2
Dear Roger,
I'd figure the "Viet Cong tanks" were captured from ones given to the SVA. The Viet Cong had absolutely zero ability to manufacture tanks, and thus they could take them but wouldn't know how to operate them.
1
Perhaps the closet approximation to the Montagnards today is the Kurds in the Middle East. Often used by the US when it suits their interests and equally discarded when it suits their interests.
17
Would those atrocities have occurred if the US had not assumed the colonial war that France lost and then abandoned?
We had no other model than Korea to stake out the boundary between us and the "communists". This boundary was the European Cold War, the ring of proxy wars in South America, Africa, the Arab world, and the Asian vacuum of colonial exodus by European powers after the brief demonstration of Europe's weakness by the Japanese.
From their first independence claim using the exact words of our Declaration of Independence and an appeal to us to help throw off the colonial yoke of the French, we abandoned Ho Chi Minh and staked the 17th parallel as our carbon copy of Korea's 38th. We established a puppet regime disliked by the vast majority of Vietnamese, rabidly corrupt, Catholic, murderous, and antithetical to Vietnamese self-determination. The Viet Cong were not the North Vietnamese and chafed at their dominance and strategies. They were the South’s voice in the freedom of Vietnam from foreigners.
Of course, terror is a tool in war. Has always been, and I can't imagine a person in current Vietnam who would have engaged in it if the world had left it to its own devices. The "South" would never have existed had we let their Declaration of Independence alone.
Today's Vietnam has to grapple with their past, as we have not been able to even after Burns' film. Nothing new. A horror of epic proportions that haunts us still and will not heal in this generation.
4
Well said. Here is a clip from my entry on this article.
As Patricia in Pasadena, Californai states, Ho Chi Minh did not start out as a Communist. In fact, to backtrack, he was also a hero in WW2 to many American and British airmen who had been flying "over the hump" in supply lines from India. Some crash-landed from lack of fuel, or were shot down by the Japanese forces in Burma. Ho Chi Minh rescued those airmen and kept them safe to be returned to friendly lines.
After the war, Minh, who had an American education, began the resistance in French Indo-China. He begged Eisenhower, his friend, for help in ridding them of the ruthless puppet dictator in Saigon. But Eisenhower sided with the French because of our mutual membership in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). Minh was left to seek help from the Chinese and Russians.
This attack would probably not have taken place if the US had not prolonged the Civil War after the defeat of the French. Readers should assume Lavelle was a CIA recruiter of these villages chiefs, not an aid worker, which made them targets of the struggle for liberation from colonial rule.
6
Interesting that most commenters are interested in rehashing the arguments, as though that's what this article is about. At the time, cruelty on the part of the NVA and the VC was denied on the left, and cruelty on the part of RVN and the US was denied on the right. But we should be able to acknowledge, at the remove of 50 years, that vicious barbarity is inherent in all wars, especially civil wars. So I hope nobody who has studied the war in a serious way is surprised to see this. There's a reason it was so wrenching for people to think about at the time.
23
Exactly. Thank you.
3
Amen. Worse yet, those aligned with the Saigon Government whether they be soldiers or civilians didn't count when the left spouted its rhetoric about a "people's struggle".
I knew many South Vietnamese and ARVNs who did not want the Hanoi government. In the end could they have fought on? Probably.
Thankfully the revolution of 1980 in the US re-directed many governments around the world.
4
Of course, Vietnamese attitudes about who should control the country were complex. But, the US still should not have been involved. US politicians knew it then and they still know it now. In much the same way, the US has no business in Korea.
4
Agree. In the midst of all of our self-flagellation, though, it's good to remember both the complexities of the situation and the cruelty of 'the other side.' We weren't the only ones who were morally wrong.
8
Civil wars can be especially brutal and so it was in Vietnam. The VC, ARVN and US all had their share. PAVN (the NVA) did have a 7 point rules of engagement for civilian treatment issued by Giap and PAVN mostly operated in lightly populated border areas (Hue in Tet excepted) leaving the bulk of the rural pop. to the VC. The tribal ethnics or Yards as they were called were looked down upon as sub-human by both sides but especially the Saigon govt which led to one rebellion against the govt 1964 or 65 I believe.
In our effort to deny food supplies to the enemy, we used herbicides in Song Re valley in Quang Nai province for crop destruction to prevent consumption by "enemy " forces. The food scheduled for destruction was 14,575 metric tons enough for 50 to 75,000 people a year and total Montagnard population just under 70,000. However, before spraying begin the area was subject to overwhelming fire from US 7th AF in order to protect the slow C-123's that sprayed. This was a 300% saturation bombing with cluster bomb units for suppression of "potential" ground fire. In the one truism of the war, the ultimate price was paid by the rural peasantry.
1
As history has shown, leftist political movements (Mao, Lenin-Stalin, Pol Pot) have ultimately killed far more people than those on the right (Hitler, Mladic, the Southern Confederacy of the U.S.). Neither extremes are ever good for the people they attempt to govern.
9
Authoritarianism is authoritarianism. If you agree that it's bad, why the pointless comparison between "leftist" and "rightist" movements?
11
What a ridiculous statement. Who knows or cares what the ultimate number of atrocities committed by left or right is? It seems you're attempting some sort of weird apologia for the right: our number of atrocities is not quite as high as theirs so go with us. Ugh.
1
If you knew anything about the documentation of the war in Vietnam, you wouldn't have made this comment. You've missed the entire point of this piece.
We have not won a war since WW2, and the Russians used rope-a-dope to defeat the Germans, while we did the heavy lifting on Japan. The Mexican "war" and the Spanish American war were both simply land grabs, we were the only aggressors. You must go back to the Revolutionary War to find a War we won. We love war however and that hasn't discouraged us in the least.If someone had placed a one hundred dollar bet in 1963 or 64 on who would win the war in Viet Nam..if you could find a taker..by 1975 you could have purchased all the State of Florida. Viet Nam didn't even have an army. We don't seem to have the ability , for whatever reason, to win military conflicts on the other side of the globe with any country. Logistics? Faint of heart? We haven't used Nuclear weapons in a long time, and we are the only country to do so.How can we win that war no matter who strikes first?
kirk....interesting you go back to the american revolution for the last win. americans usually allege they won the war of 1812 when, in reality, it was a draw. the usa with a population of about 7,500,000 attacked a country of about 500,000 which was still part of Britain. the brits were also trying to rid a guy named napoleon from taking over Europe at the same time. the war of 1812 was almost an afterthought. on top of all this, the battle of new Orleans which was a big deal for the usa mattered not a whit in the grand scheme of things--except for the poor souls who were killed or maimed--since the war had been over for several weeks at the time of the fighting.
and even the American revolution very likely would've turned out differently but for french support of money and military might. Yorktown, and what came before, would've been a very different story.....
5
South Vietnam did have an Army. My father was there and fought with both the South Vietnamese Army and also the Montagnards in the mountains.
5
Neither the Mexican-American War nor the Spanish-American War withstanding, of course.
Most but not all of the errors committed by the US in Vietnam were driven by either domestic political considerations or a failure of comprehension (stupidity). Most American policy and action initiatives were driven by "good intentions", but in translation to the local theater those intentions went awry: bombing a people into submission usually has bad consequences. The Vietcong, though a legitimate national movement, were also engaged in a domestic power struggle. As we can see today bad things happen during civil wars, even non-violent (For the most part so far) one's such as is transpiring today in the US. As with with VC we have a domestic political faction allied with a foreign power (by coincidence perhaps also Russia) attempting to overthrow the institutions of the State and take control of the organs of State and the levers of power. Ironic.
2
It's good that the writer is reminding everyone that communists did atrocities, but throwing in the "Too" is somewhat disingenuous. Near the end of the essay she basically implies that there was no difference between atrocities committed by either side, and that is utterly ridiculous. Atrocities, as she in other places points out, were part of the communist policy, Dak Son, Hue, and so many other events leave no question. Atrocities were never part of US or RVN policies, they were deviations, and killed a comparative tiny fraction of the murders committed by the communists. Implying moral equivalence between the Vietnamese communist forces and those resisting them is no less foolish than implying more equivalence between the Allies and the Axis in WW2.
31
Tell us about the North Vietnamese/NLF equivalents to "Search and Destroy", "Kill Everything that Moves", The Phoenix Program, napalm, Agent Orange, and bombing raids that killed - according to McNamara - 4 million.
23
Reread that article, or perhaps read in the first place.
Forget Mai Lai, forget Tiger Force, forget the Phoenix Program, forget Agent Orange. Just one fact: between two and three million Vietnamese died in the Vietnam War, a third of whom died from bombing. Now the Vietcong didn't have any airplanes and the North Vietnamese didn't control the skies. That leaves us. I don't think those bombing campaigns were devised in the heat of emotion, rather they were thought out, pre-meditated. I'm not saying that justifies what the Viet Cong did, but I don't think it justifies what we did either.
2
is this piece supposed to make americans feel better about invading vietnam?
6
It is good, Prof. Stur that you and other historians acknowledge the terror of Vietnamese against Vietnamese.
I was wondering though what steps the North Vietnamese and later Vietnam took to punish those Viet Cong who were guilty of terrorism against their own people. Were they punished? Brought to trial? Or perhaps were they given medals?
13
Please refresh my memory - what steps did the US government take against American perpetrators of mass death, especially Presidents Johnson and Nixon??
3
@Dennis Brasky
Show me anything from the Vietnamese side:
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/army-captain-charged-with-my-...
3
To Dennis Brasky---Viet Nam wrecked Johnson's chances to run for a second term. And let's give Nixon some credit for slowly but surely pulling out American troops out of Viet Nam.
For the perpetrators of evil, death and destruction are sufficient ends in themselves. If those who commit atrocities choose to excuse their vile acts -- in this case, ostensibly, terrorism -- then that is a mere rationalization.
Whether it be in Viet Nam, Nigeria, Srebrenica, Armenia, Myanmar, Nazi Germany, or even, sad to say, here in North America, the murder and persecution of the innocents is pure and utter evil -- labels or excuses notwithstanding.
In every such case, the international community must act, first and foremost, to protect those who cannot ensure their own safety and security. That is especially so when the leaders of the counties in which the vulnerable reside are complicit in -- or even worse, sponsor -- the evil directed against the persecuted.
3
I'm stunned that we can still turn our backs on genocide. We never learn.
3
The U.S. got involved in the Viet Nam war after the Viet Cong et al murdered 500,000 Viet Namese through 1965.
3
Remember the famous photo of the VC fighter being executed by an ARVN general: he'd just killed a a whole family.
5
Professor Stur did a superb justice to share fringe humanistic stories that are often neglected/dismissed in the fog of war. Heroism is found in many mundane places.
3
I don't recall anyone ever denying the Viet Cong committed atrocities. The difference is the Americans committed atrocities over there and there were no Viet Cong over here.
Worse than that, throughout the American involvement in Vietnam - beginning in 1946 with the support of the return of French colonialism, followed in 1956 with the subversion of the elections mandated by the Geneva Accords - American officials at the highest levels understood that a majority of the Vietnamese people wished for a united Vietnam led by Ho Chi Min.
34
I don't know that anyone has denied Viet Cong atrocities. But I believe that a lot of people, particulars people who weren't even born yet in 1975, are unaware of have forgotten.
1
"Most Vietnamese"? That is simply not true.
The deaths and atrocities caused by the U.S. side during the Vietnam War dwarf any caused by the other side. Over 3 million dead, mainly non-combatants is an atrocity that overwhelms all others. As a Vietnam Veteran I feel strongly there was no equality of violence or blame in that war. There was the bully, and there was the bullied, who fought back as best they could.
15
It's kind of funny to me how Americans are often keen on chastising America for its kill rate and occasional war crimes during war, but they tend to ignore how the other side was far worse.
I have no problem believing the Viet Cong slaughtered civilians and carried out a lot of terrorist attacks. I know nobody remembers this at all, but their close relations in Cambodia killed over two million civilians under Pol Pot, starting when America withdrew.
The same thing continues today, in our fight against the Daesh. Americans are always complaining about the collateral damage our airstrikes cause, or how we shouldn't use depleted uranium tank shells. Meanwhile the Daesh are decapitating civilians for not having beards, and gunning down women for not wearing hats.
War is always awful, but despite the trendiness of bashing America, usually the groups we fight are far more barbaric than we are. It'd be nice if people could remember this kind of thing, but knowing Americans, they won't.
21
I'm glad that we reflect on our actions. Sometimes we get carried and forget what our original intention was. I also think it's good to remember what we were/are fighting for. Or what we believe.
And, yet, we turn our backs on Yemen and the Rohinga and the Kurds and the Sudanese and.........we could go on forever. Why?
In the meantime, Daesh must be ended. I don't know how, since we weren't successful with the Taliban, but we owe it to the populations involved to stick up for them and give them a chance to re-establish their countries.
It looks impossible, but those of us who don't have to fight for survival every day (including all rich countries) have to find a way to get human rights to take root around the world. And, no, I don't think that imposing our culture. We aren't so great at civil rights, ourselves.
3
Dear Cynthia Hennecke,
Actually I agree with you, we should definitely reflect on our international actions and strive to do better. I think we should never have gotten involved in Vietnam, and had we properly internalized that, we probably wouldn't have invaded Iraq, which was also idiotic and counterproductive.
And I agree that the Daesh have to be defeated, but I also don't know how best to do that. And that we should have tried to prevent all the recent genocides that we ignored.
Really my main point was just that while criticizing the U.S. for its wartime behavior, we should always note that we aren't usually as bad as the groups we're fighting.
As for improving human rights and such, I think we need to take a different tactic, butter rather than guns. Ideally we should stop selling arms around the world, convince the other main suppliers to do the same, provide free birth control and educational materials worldwide, and reward places that improve their human rights with beneficial trade pacts. But unfortunately the traditional American response to that sort of humanitarian effort is, "what's the profit for us in that?".
3
Interesting you mention Pol Pot/Cambodia, Dan Stackhouse, as that country's genocide would certainly not have happened if we didn't expand the war over there - America is to blame for that, too. No matter how much false equivalence you try to throw into your argument, there's no getting around the fact that we were there to support a corrupt and murderous regime (South Vietnam), so our being there in the first place was a crime.
2
I don't find "Well, they did it too" a very compelling argument.
We were the invaders. Pretty simple. Very clear at the time.
The Vietnamese had just spent the entire postwar period repelling a Western power. Was it so difficult to understand that they would continue? That no matter how much we supported our puppets, only more death would result? That they would fight to the last life -- American or Vietnamese -- to have their country?
Would we not have done the same? Actually, we did.
52
Not all the Vietnamese wished to be under a communist government. Although the leaders were corrupt, citizens wished to live free. If all the Vietnamese wished to be communist then during the Tet offensive they would have joined the Vietcong and fought. That did not happen, the Tet offensive failed (although the press said differently). If this idea was true, then why the re-education camps after the war? Why the boat people? No, not everyone wanted life under the red star.
8
I'm so glad to see your comments since you have more direct knowledge of the conflict.
1
As someone who came to the US as a Vietnamese refugee in 1975, I couldn't agree more with Moira Rogow's statement above. If we had wished to be Communist, we wouldn't have risked our lives getting out of Vietnam to try to escape Communism. The stories of what people went through to get here are a testament to that, and it wasn't a small amount of people.
I think this author's statements recognizing the crimes committed by the Communists is, though not perfect, a step in the right direction of acknowledging that atrocities were committed by them as policy, whereas any atrocities committed by the US and ARVN were the exception. It is rare to find someone in the academic field write something along these lines when the majority of her peers strongly disagrees with her, and it was encouraging to see it posted in the NYT, when this type of opinion is still in the minority for articles that are published. I applaud both for this kind of growth, and encourage more of the same type of growth.
8
An excellent piece. The recent historical review of this conflict is essential since the war has been subjected to way too much jingoism (“America’s fight against godless communism”) and naive idealistic characterization by leftist political types. What is true it seems is that American foreign policy was terribly misguided after WWII when failed to comprehend the anti colonial nature of these struggles in the first instance. The self serving Cold War policies of the Dulles brothers has been well documented. John Foster an Allen Dulles’ use of government to advance their corporate client’s economic interests along with the jingoism referred to above, contributed to the mess we got into not just in Vietnam but in Iran and Central America. We certainly had interests that needed to be protected in all these regions post WWII, and there is no question that the Soviets had their own dangerous agenda we needed to combat. However I am dismayed we were not able to fashion a smart foreign policy that protected the real interests of our nation that did not result in the Vietnam War.
3
To pick a starting point in history and find justice from that point on is just an impossibility.
The Viet Nam Conflict was 80 years old when we got involved with dozens of culpable parties already in 1945.
At the end of WW2 Ho Chi Min quoted Thomas Jefferson and needed American help and we turned him down.
Our support of French colonialism and turning away from true American values IS the Viet Nam War.
That is an Atrocity.
24
Do you really believe Ho Chi Min was for democracy until we turned him down? Read about him and read some of his writings. He was never going that route. Ever.
4
Even longer, I think - if I remember correctly, there was a North/South division that went back to the 1500s. The players changed, but the situation mostly didn't.
1
The division of the country into three sections was created by the French - "divide and conquer." As for Ho, he was a nationalist who, after being spurned by the West at the post WW1 Versailles Peace Convention, turned to the Communist International as the only political force supporting anti-colonialist efforts. After WW2 when his Vietminh worked with the US against Japanese occupation, he promised neutrality between the US and USSR if the US opposed France's restoration of colonial power, going as far as to promise not to grant the USSR a naval base at Camhran Bay. His Vietminh murdered Vietnamese Trotskyists and other nationalists after WW2 who opposed his allowing the British to come in, arm defeated Japanese troops, and pave the way for the French to return with promises of "eventual" independence. Only after the French reneged and attacked, did he fight back - eight years from 1946 - 1954. The US eventually financed over 80% of the French effort, even going as far as to consider sending "tactical" nukes to avoid what was to be the French disaster at Dien Bien Phu.
There has never been a war without atrocities by both sides.
4
The Viet Cong were nothing but terrorists, as the well-known incident at Dak Son shows.
We were told when we arrived in-country that they would automatically kill our wounded, they enjoyed torturing civilians and soldiers alike, and that they rarely took prisoners.
The VC also used children to do such things as tossing grenades at us and they were well known to dismember civilians and soldiers to display their viciousness.
These were up close and personal acts of intentional violence and not acts of war that should be overlooked. Not that the communist government of Vietnam would allow it, but notice that Dak Son nor the many other acts of terrorism committed by the VC (and North Vietnamese Army, for that matter) have found their way into court rooms.
Imagine that.
7
Lavelle was nothing but a foreign terrorist inciting violent support for barbarian invaders against the liberation movement.
2
You can't be serious.
1
Of course both sides committed atrocities.
But that doesn’t mean both sides are equally responsible.
There would have been no atrocities had there been no war, and it was the U.S. that was responsible for that. No doubt there would still have been atrocities committed during the Vietnamese civil war, but they would have been fewer if only because the civil war would have ended sooner.
It surprises me that so many of the articles in this series seem intended to minimize American responsibility for the war.
42
The point of these articles is perhaps to fight the narratives that exists in certain circles (namely, liberal ones) that without U.S. involvement Vietnam, and many other places in the world, would have been a happy place after an internal kerfuffle.
No one knows if the atrocities would have been fewer of the US had stayed out. Likely yes. But look at what happened in Cambodia, a smaller country where millions were killed, and where no foreign power stood to fight Pol Pot.
It is simply untrue historically that involvement by foreign powers always results in worst outcomes. Arguably, some of history's worst genocides occurred precisely because nothing was done to stop home-bred madness, while larger catastrophes were avoided because of (often belated) foreign involvement (Bosnia, Rwanda for example).
to say that things would have ended better if the the civil war had been allowed to play out is speculation not grounded in history. The winner of the Russian civil war (Stalin) engaged in a campaign of starving tens of millions of his countrymen. Mao did the same.
We don't know what would have happened. I think the U.S. role can properly be criticized for what we in fact did, but to say that it would have been far better if we had done nothing is baseless.
8
The war was started by the Communists invading from the North after they signed the Paris peace treaty.
Atruth and Andrew Miller, after the French loss at Dien Bien Phu, the Paris peace treaty left North Vietnam in control of the communists, and the South to be decided by elections in 1956. It was the U.S. under Eisenhower who had the South Vietnamese government cancel the elections. (One of the few mistakes Eisenhower was to make in foreign policy.) South Vietnam then faced its own civil war between local communists, known to us as the Viet Cong, later to be assisted and controlled by the NVA. If the elections had been held in 1956 the people of the South who have voted to join with the North. Eisenhower knew this which is why he had the election canceled.
2
All highly-charged topics such as this war, or our current political atmosphere, or such trivial concerns as our favorite sports team, are seen through the corrupting lens of confirmation bias. Unfortunately, an article such as this the purpose of which is to inform readers of a part of the reality of that war, will for many be used as support for their entrenched position. One can only hope that the article might encourage at least some of those readers, on either side of the issue, to instead confront their own biases by asking, "Why did this happen, on both sides of the conflict?", or, "What can we do to reduce or eliminate such destructive acts in the future, even within a military conflict?" Questioning through reasoned dialogue is the best, perhaps only way to combat confirmation bias. This opinion was just recently put forth in this article, http://bit.ly/2oOkVvF , by the excellent writer Elizabeth Kolbert.
4
Excellent....almost all the responses here are self serving validations of strongly held beliefs and narratives. While I can argue with specific points in the article, your wider point that this, and all the articles in the NYT series on Vietnam help us understand that particular time and place and are critical to our collective learning. Unfortunately most people don’t want to do the work of exploring and challenging their beliefs and assumptions. Thus America in 2017. As a witness, along with the rest of the Boomers of the tragedy of Vietnam, this series is a useful resource to better understand the war 50 years later - and its impacts across our culture, politics and foreign relations.
Yes they did. As mentioned, it was a thin (Red) line that this or any insurgency/civil war engenders. Public opinion at home in a liberal/democratic society must be considered when a weaker force is challenging a stronger force as the British and French learned the hard way in the post WWII world of de-colonialization. I am sure that on the ground Agent Orange and B-52 bombs were atrocities. Understanding but not accepting atrocities also involves learning how and why decisions are made on both sides as David Halberstrom did in his work or more recently Max Boot in "Invisible Armies".
Vietnam now enjoys "most favored nations" trade status with the US and our fleet visits former hotspots. It is time to reflect on how leaders in Washington and elsewhere make a deadly difference in war choices. We have Vietnam and Iraq in our experience and one should have been enough. Honor to the men and women called to battle, but not so much for those doing such calling.
33
I object to the noxious moral equivalency of this opinion piece. While no one has argued that the NLF ("Viet Cong" is a perjorative term) was a group of choirboys, their policies did not push the Saigon regime into harsh repressive measures which then justified them. The regime's repression started under Diem in the late 1950s when hundreds of thousands were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. It was this violence that forced revolutionaries in the South to organize the NLF - with reluctant support from Hanoi.
4