For America, the war in Vietnam had begun. At home very few people noticed this. The country was torn between the news of a presidential election campaign and worry about the battle for the rights of American minorities, in which young Americans would give their lives in a situation that was truly black and white. The Vietnam war was only a cloud on the horizon. But that cloud was to bring a thunder without equal in the history of warfare-Operation Rolling Thunder, the air war against North Vietnam.
At first, the American policy was to be one of increasing pressure to force the North Vietnamese to Stop their support for rebellion in the south. To avoid miscalculation, or further miscalculation, President Johnson sent another message to Hanoi through Blair Seaborn. Seaborn informed Pham Van Dong that the United States would take the war more and more to the north. The prime minister reacted with great anger and with the threat to spread the war through all of Southeast Asia.
But the United States bombardment and the threats of stronger action ahead did nothing to help the military or political situation in the south. Between mid-August and mid-September, the leadership in Saigon changed hands five more times between Generals Minh and Khanh. At the end of August, nearly five hundred persons were killed in religious rioting in the South Vietnamese capital.
This time, though, the protests were not limited to Saigon. The first antiwar demonstrations on an American college campus took place at the University of California in Berkeley on September 30, and a number of important people in the United States began to speak about their doubts as to the wisdom of American involvement. Among these people were Senator William Fulbright, the chief sponsor of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and Robert Kennedy, President Kennedy’s brother and Lyndon Johnson’s Attorney General.
Just at the time that some Americans began to be worried by their nation’s role in Vietnam, the war came home to America in a very dramatic way. On November, NLF forces attacked the United States Air Force base at Bien Hoa. Four Americans were killed and five bombers were destroyed. These were not the first Americans to die in Vietnam, but the ones who had died before had not been attacked because they were Americans. They had been killed while they were advising South Vietnamese troops. This was an attack on United States forces because they were just that. The American Joint Chiefs of Staff described the attack to the president as “a change in the ground rules.” They asked for permission to bomb North Vietnamese Air Force bases.
The president was only two days away from an election, and he refused to take immediate action. He asked instead that the State Department prepare a list of choices for him. On November 3, 1964 Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater by a huge number of votes. Three weeks later he was presented with the State Department’s list of choices.
The choice selected was that of a “surgical” bombing. Targets would be selected and destroyed; then the bombing would stop while a North Vietnamese response was awaited. If no acceptable response was received, a second round of bombing would begin. Again the bombers would stop. The State Department thought that the North Vietnamese would seek talks within two to six months.
While Johnson picked the surgical bombing, he did not start it at once. He would wait for another North Vietnamese action. As the important year of 1964 came to an end, there was another change in the Saigon government. Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu were part of the new government. They were to stay in power in one job or another until the very last days of the war. This political calm gave the South Vietnamese the ability to continue their struggle.
By early 1965, this was clearly a war against North Vietnam. While there certainly had been some North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam prior to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, they had played a quiet role. North Vietnamese troops now fought in the South in the open and with great skill. Their presence caused more American planning, but this time those plans called for the use of American ground troops.
The NLF pushed again on February 7, 1965, when they attacked the American military base at Pleiku. Nine Americans died and seventy-six were wounded. President Johnson ordered an immediate response. Operation Flaming Dart involved fifty planes from American aircraft carriers. Together they attacked a major North Vietnamese base at Dong Hoi. Because of the way the war was changing. President Johnson ordered the families of American troops out of Vietnam.
Three days later the NLF attacked a hotel being used as barracks by American soldiers. President Johnson decided that the policy of responding when attacked was not leading anywhere and started a new policy of “sustained reprisal.” This strange phrase really meant a policy of bombing-until-they-stop. No attack would be needed in the future. Day after day, week after week, the bombers would fly over North Vietnam. Operation Rolling Thunder had begun. It was to last for three and a half years and to have almost no real effect.
While this type of bombing makes military sense because it can cause great damage with a very low risk to the pilots and planes, it has not been a very successful strategy. The Germans tried it against the British in World War II, and it backfired on them because it made the British fight harder. The British and Americans tried it against Germany later in the war with more success because they were able to destroy much of Germany’s war industries. The Americans also tried the tactic on the Japanese in World War II and accomplished very little until atomic weapons were used.
There was every reason to believe that the plan would be far less successful against the North Vietnamese. That nation did not have the many large cities and industrial areas that Germany had, so there were no very important targets. Most of North Vietnam’s supplies could be brought in from China along trails American bombers could not find. The supply depots could easily be spread throughout the countryside. When you spread out the targets the bombing becomes more difficult.
But, in March of 1965, Rolling Thunder began, and behind it came American Marines who landed at the naval base in Da Nang. They had been sent to Vietnam against the wishes of Ambassador Taylor. He felt that American troops would never succeed in a guerrilla war in Asia. They would always be targets, but would never be able to tell who among the natives was the enemy until the first shots had been fired.
On March 8, three thousand five hundred marines landed. By June there were fifty-one thousand foreign troops in South Vietnam. Most of these were Americans, but some seven thousand were from New Zealand and Australia, who were part of the SEATO alliance.
At first these troops were not meant to fight. Their job was to aid the South Vietnamese army, not to oppose the NLF and North Vietnamese themselves. But they were allowed to defend themselves against enemy attacks. Naturally, such a large number of troops traveling with South Vietnamese army troops who were looking for combat would have many opportunities to defend themselves when fights broke out. The idea of just advising the South Vietnamese was a fiction, and in April, 1965, it ended when the President allowed United States ground troops to take offensive action against NLF and North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam.
But, for the moment, the major American involvement was in the air. By June, 1965, Operation Rolling Thunder had earned its name. American bombers were making four thousand eight hundred attacks a month on North Vietnamese targets. By 1967, that number would reach twelve thousand. By the time Rolling Thunder ended in October of 1968, more bombs had been dropped on North Vietnam than had been dropped in all of World War II.
The days of major ground war were not far off though. The air war was not having any noticeable effect on the situation in South Vietnam. lts main target was supplies, and the guerrillas could do without new supplies for long periods of time. In July, President Johnson raised the American commitment to one hundred and twenty-five thousand troops and announced that it was likely that more would be needed.
The first ground combat operations began a new era in the history of warfare. Small groups of troops were brought to an area by helicopters. There they sought out enemy forces and fought those that they found. When the fight was over, the helicopters would come back and return the American troops to their home base and take the wounded to hospitals. No land was gained nor was any land really wanted. This was not a war for land. It was a war in which both sides sought to cause enough losses on the other side to make them give up hope. Two armies were engaged in a siege against each other, trying to wear each other down.
A part of this awful business was the body count. Each day military officers in Saigon would tell the press the number of enemy killed. These numbers came from reports from the field, and each day on American television a report would be given on the number of enemy dead. This would always be a fairly large number while the number of American dead would always be a fairly small number.
But that number of American dead was growing quickly as the United States combat role increased. Between August and December of 1965, 808 Americans were killed in Vietnam. In the next year the total reached over five thousand. General Westmoreland was told by McNamara that he could ask for as many troops as he needed. And he needed greater and greater numbers because, among other reasons, the South Vietnamese army was not fighting very well.
One cause of this can be found in these figures. Of those called into the South Vietnamese army only one out of seven showed up. Almost one Out of every four South Vietnamese troops deserted. For cultural, religious and political reasons, the people of South Vietnam were not strongly in support of the war.
The chances of defeating an enemy like the NLF, who could melt into the villages at a moment’s notice, were very slight without support among the people for their defeat.
The problem of support for the war was not only in South Vietnam. Opposition in the United States also was growing quickly. In November of 1965, two Americans imitated the Buddhist monks and burned themselves on American streets. Those same streets were filled by thirty-five thousand protesters who marched on the White House that same month.
The roots of the American protest movement are many. At first it was a radical movement, led by Americans who, for one reason or another, rejected the society in which they lived. Some of these people had been working for racial equality in the United States and had been turned against their own society by the horror they saw in some communities’ efforts to keep black citizens in a poor position. Others had chosen a radical form of politics in which they saw the Chinese or Russian communist system as better than the American capitalist system. Still others were pacifists who opposed any war.
These people were very sincere. But it is fair to say that the first protesters had no real influence or popular support. It was not until 1968, when the antiwar movement had found leadership in elected officials from the American Midwest, that it began to have a real effect on American policy.
Yet these first protests brought national attention to the events in Southeast Asia. The slow growth of the war had not been noticed in the mid- 1960s. These were dramatic times. The civil rights movement was making progress and making changes all over the nation. The American economy was booming and Lyndon Johnson was building the Great Society he had promised in his election campaign.
Vietnam was first noticed by young men who were being drafted into the army. College students, faced with two years in the military, listened to those who said that the Vietnam war was wasting lives. It was their lives that would be wasted.
The students began to ask basic questions. Why are we in Vietnam? Was the NLF a nationalist or a communist organization? Would the fall of Vietnam mean the fall of all of Southeast Asia? If Vietnam is important to the free world, does that mean that the very unfree South Vietnamese government should be helped by American weapons and American lives?
The government did not answer these questions very well. Facts about America’s role were first denied and then explained away. The Johnson Administration was not believed by an important part of the American people. The antiwar groups also could not always be believed. Some seemed to make heroes of the NLF. While it is true that the NLF came closer to meeting the hopes of the South Vietnamese people than did their government, they also could be very cruel and not necessarily people to look up to. Between 1966 and 1971, NLF forces had killed over twenty thousand civilians and kidnapped many more. These were not acts of war, but part of a campaign of terrorism.
Despite growing doubts and active opposition at home, the war in Vietnam continued to grow. By the end of 1965, there were one hundred and eighty-one thousand American troops in Vietnam. By the end of 1966, that figure had reached three hundred and eighty-five thousand. The next year the figure jumped by another one hundred thousand and by the end of 1968 it had reached its greatest strength of five hundred and thirty-six thousand. The casualties grew along with the troop figures. Casualties (dead or wounded) rose from eighteen thousand in 1966 to nearly fifty thousand in 1968.
These are just numbers, and they do not explain the lives and deaths of American troops in Vietnam. These young people found themselves in the middle of a war that they did not understand, following orders that often made little sense and returning home to an America that either ignored them or disliked them.
The story of these American troops is a complex one, which continues to the present day. In the next chapter we will try to get some feeling of how they viewed the war, America’s attitude toward them and their role in it.