The word “Vietnam” means different things to different people today. To many it means an issue that was the center of attention during eight years of American life. To others, who fought in it, it recalls the friendships and sorrows of combat, or moments of personal bravery or great fear.
In a large sense Vietnam means failure. Whether that was a failure of the American government or a failure of the American people can be argued. In the chapters ahead we will view the war in Southeast Asia from its very beginnings and that may make the debate clearer. One of the first things we will see is that war in Vietnam did not begin with the arrival of American troops or even with the earlier arrival of French troops. War began a century before Christ and continues to this day.
This is important. To see the Vietnam war as ten years of American conflict is to miss its basic character. It is like watching a thirty second report on the evening news. One can learn some facts in that time but one cannot gain understanding. We need to understand Vietnam. We need to know why it happened, as well as how it happened. We need to grasp the nature of the failure in order to draw lessons from it for the future.
The Vietnam War was a complex of events. Like most such events its meaning changes with the viewpoint of the person watching it. On many of the important issues involving the conduct of the war there are at least two different stories of what happened and why it happened. But, even so, this doesn’t mean that we can’t draw lessons from it.
The assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 is not a very complex event. Yet there are many different stories about how it happened. Some say the deed was done by a lone assassin. Others argue that there must have been two or more persons involved. Even those who hold with the conspiracy view argue about who was involved in it. Some say the Russians planned it. Others say it was the C.I.A. Some think it was Fidel Castro while others favour J. Edgar Hoover or organized crime.
Soon after the event the answers to these questions were very important. As time went by, they became much less so. The question that will affect the world for many years is not how the assassination came about but what came about because of the assassination.
This is also true of Vietnam. What happened and how it happened are still important. Was the president lied to by the military? Did the president lie to the American people? Were the Viet Cong a group seeking freedom for their people or were they part of some international communist plot? The answers to these questions would provide a basis for better ways for America to deal with the world around it in the future, so these questions should not be ignored.
But there are bigger and more important questions, whose answers can be lost if our only worry is on placing blame and finding fault. Why was America in Vietnam? Did it have a good reason? If the reason was good, why did America fail to reach its goal? If the reason was bad, how should large and powerful nations behave in the future?
These are not easy questions and they will not be more than partly answered in this book.
No one would disagree with the idea that we should avoid another involvement like Vietnam, but there would be widespread disagreement as to what “Vietnam” was. When we were very young we all were afraid of “monsters.” But if we all were asked to write down what a monster was we would get some pretty different answers. Vampires and werewolves would fill the pages of those who have been frightened by Dracula movies. Trolls and ogres would be described by those who grew up on Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Before we can deal with “monsters,” we must agree on what a “monster” is. So understanding “Vietnam” is something we must do as well. For just as Vietnam was an important matter for your parents, its unanswered questions may be of great importance to you.
But the war in Vietnam is not simply something to draw lessons from. It is a story too. Indeed, it is the basic story of the second half of the twentieth century. It was a battle between Western machinery and Eastern patience; between two different social systems; between the New world and the Third World; between Catholics and Buddhists; between rich and poor; between colonialism and nationalism; between white and yellow.
And within these battles are countless stories. The stories of presidents in political struggle; the stories of soldiers in war; the story of hometown protests of the actions of the government, in the United States and in Vietnam; the story of government itself and what its purpose should be.
The tale that follows is complicated. In World War II most of the important events took place on the battlefield with thousands of witnesses. In Vietnam they often took place in the president’s office in Washington or Ho Chi Minh’s office in Vietnam. We know a great deal about what happened in Washington and almost nothing about the thinking in the city of Hanoi in Vietnam. It is difficult to know what really happened, but that makes the task of learning about Vietnam difficult, not hopeless.
There are more useful lessons to be drawn from this conflict than from any other event of this century. That we have to work hard to understand Vietnam doesn’t mean that it is not worthwhile to do so.