Making the Geopolitical Intensely Personal - Essay Example

Making the Geopolitical Intensely Personal: Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam The war in Vietnam was different from most of the other conflicts in American history. There was not a clear point of entry into the conflict – a stark contrast with the horrific night of Pearl Harbor, for example. The rationale behind United States involvement lacked the hearty sentiments of Manifest Destiny or the hated enemies Kaiser Bill or Adolf Hitler. It may have been these murky beginnings that made the war such an unpopular one, and a topic that enervated rather than energized the American public. It may have been this lack of unity regarding the Vietnam conflict that offended President Johnson, who sought to turn the conflict around and make it a positive factor in American society. The conflict, of course, began when the French decided to release their colonial claims to Vietnam. The French army was driven from Vietnam in 1954, resulting in the Geneva Peace Accords. This created a temporary partition of Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, until 1956, when nationwide elections would be held. While the Communist powers in the Soviet Union and China did want the entire nation of Vietnam to become Communist, they predicted that the 1956 election would accomplish their aims without bringing the United States into the conflict (The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975). Rather than initiate another conflict similar to Korea, the American government began a concerted effort to win the political minds of those living to the south of the Communist zone. A major part of this effort was the creation of SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization). Initially, the American efforts were successful: the 1956 elections brought Ngo Dinh Diem, a firm opponent of Communism, to power in South Vietnam. However, Diem claimed that the North Vietnamese were preparing to take the southern half of Vietnam by force, and the Americans began aiding his military maneuvers against the northern half in 1957. Diem used a variety of brutal internal measures in South Vietnam to quell the Communist insurgency, including Law 10/59, which permitted authorities to hold anyone who was suspected of being a Communist indefinitely, without bringing charges. Over time, Diem became increasingly autocratic, which made him an increasingly difficult leader for the United States to support. In response, the Communist insurgency began to increase the amount of violence in its protests (The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975). The National Liberation Front was the official organization for those in South Vietnam who wanted to overthrow Diem’s government. Created on December 20, 1960, the NLF had only one requirement for membership: applicants had to be opposed to Diem’s rule. While the American government scorned the NLF as a mere puppet of the North Vietnamese Communist government, giving it the slur “Viet Cong,” there are many who were inside and outside the NLF who claimed that the majority of its members were not Communists – thus showing how unpopular Diem had actually become. President Kennedy’s policy toward Diem was neither full assistance nor full rejection: the United States supplied advisers and equipment to the South Vietnamese government, but did not commit a large-scale complement of troops to assist Diem’s military in its conflict against the NLF (The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975). This level of assistance was not sufficient to keep the South Vietnamese government stable. After Diem’s brother led raids on the Buddhist pagodas throughout the country, claiming that the priests were harboring Communists, there were protests throughout the country, including one in Saigon where a Buddhist priest set himself on fire. The Americans gave some of Diem’s general support for a coup, and so on November 1, 1963, Diem and his brother were captured and later killed. On November 22, however, President Kennedy was assassinated, bringing Vice President Lyndon Johnson into the role of Chief Executive (The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975). At this point in time, there were 16,000 American military advisers stationed in Vietnam. However, the political difficulties in South Vietnam did not seem to be abating, which made many wonder what the effectiveness of those advisers was. Even before the attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin, the new President was already planning a significant increase in the American military presence in South Vietnam. Matters accelerated on August 2 and 4, 1964, when the North Vietnamese attacked an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was the American political response, which gave the President wide-ranging executive powers to use during times of war. The military response to the attacks was a series of limited air attacks against North Vietnam. There was much dissent inside the government as to how militarily involved the next steps should be – the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged an expanded air campaign over the north, while the civilians in government wanted to be more choosy about the bombing targets. While all of this arguing was going on, the NLF attacked two American army installations in the south, which led President Johnson to institute Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign, and to send significant troop increases into the south (The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975). Because there had been a number of incidents in which American soldiers had mistaken local civilians for Viet Cong soldiers, or spies, the new regulation was that “no fire be directed at unarmed Vietnamese unless they were running”(Caputo, p. 74).  The new soldiers were troubled by this, because they had no desire to shoot civilians, and so they wondered why the act of running would make a civilian instantly eligible for death.  They also wondered if shooting a running Vietnamese who turned out to be innocent could lead to their own court-martial.  After a lengthy conversation, the commander finally said, “Look, I don’t know what this is supposed to mean, but I talked to battalion and they said that as far as they’re concerned, if he’s dead and Vietnamese, he’s [Viet Cong]” (Caputo, p. 74).  While O’Brien was in Vietnam too, he sworn that, he would write books about why the war was morally wrong upon his return. He described the war in this way: It was like trying to pin the tail on the Asian donkey, but there was no tail and no donkey.  In a year I only saw the living enemy once.  All I saw were flashes from the foliage and the results, the bodies.  In books or films it is desirable to have a climactic battle scene, but the world does not operate in those gross dramatic terms.  In Vietnam there was a general aimlessness, not just in the physical sense, but beyond that in the moral and ethical sense (Bookrags).  This lack of distinction made a degree of sense, given the number of Vietnamese civilians who turned out to be carrying weapons, or bombs, that ended up killing American soldiers.  However, the moral blankness that such a war requires, particularly when the war itself lacked moral justification, has already twisted the minds of the battalion commands, and would go on to twist the minds of the American soldiers. Small wonder, then, that the Vietnam War featured extensive drug use by the American military – anything to get the consciousness of the soldier away from the task at hand.  Small wonder that American soldiers returned home to be jeered and spit upon by their civilian counterparts.  Small wonder that the world’s view of American foreign policy, and its inherent morality, took a turn as a result of Vietnam that, especially given the later incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq, will take decades of skilled diplomacy to repair. References: O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990: 1-26. Caputo, Philip.  A Rumor of War.  New York:  Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1997.  The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975. http://vietnam.vassar.edu/overview.html (accessed April 14, 2008). BookRags Book Notes on The Things They Carried. http://www.bookrags.com/notes/tttc/ (accessed April 14, 2008) Ebert, Roger.  We Were Soldiers.  http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20020301/REVIEWS/203010305/102.htm (accessed April 14, 2008) (I used this site http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/bib4.html and the interview was highlighted) Read More