Dating America’s major wars has rarely been difficult or controversial. Absent or present a constitutional declaration of war, the trigger events have been beyond dispute – the Battle of Lexington and Concord triggered the Revolutionary War; Fort Sumter, the Civil War; and Pearl Harbor, America’s World War II; while North Korea’s crossing the 38th parallel brought the US into the Korean War.
Why should we care what year our Vietnam began? Mercifully, it’s long over. For those who caught the Vietnam Memorial ceremony in Washington this past Memorial Day, the issue must have been somewhat puzzling. President Obama chose the occasion to solemnly declare the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War. At the same time, he announced the launch of an official Vietnam War Commemoration that is to last 13 years, until 2025. Where did all this come from? Well, the Congress, presumably in a bipartisan spirit, mandated the Secretary of Defense to plan a commemoration back in 2006, and the Pentagon brought forth a preliminary plan in ’10. Why then wait two years for the launch, what’s the significance of 2012?
The President chose to couple the opening of the commemoration with a significant anniversary, the 50th of the war, but counting back from this year would mean the Vietnam War started in 1962. A strange choice, as we shall see. First of all, US involvement in the fate of Vietnam goes back much further, moving forward in time in what might be called mini and maxi escalatory steps. It began in 1950 when President Truman sent military aid to the French struggling against the Viet Minh, a national communist insurgency in Indochina, and established the MAAG-I (Military Advisory Assistance Group-Indochina).
If one had been on the other side
fighting the French colonialists for Vietnamese independence, US aid would most
likely have been felt to be an unfriendly act. Of course, Truman was acting in
the context of the then-intense early Cold War, assisting a US ally, France,
against an adversary being armed by our enemy, the Soviet Union. Still, imagine
if the French had chosen to lend military support to the Redcoats trying to
suppress the American colonial rebellion instead of coming to our assistance in
our long revolutionary war to gain independence. We would have surely regarded
that as a hostile act, an act of war.
Ike, President Eisenhower,
continued our involvement in Vietnam even after the Viet Minh decisively
defeated the French in ’54, and the great powers at Geneva split the newly
independent country into two parts divided roughly at the 17th
parallel. North Vietnam was supported by the USSR, while South Vietnam became a
client state of the US. Under the Geneva Agreements, Ike sent several hundred
US military advisors to help the South build an army. When the guerrilla
insurgency from the North began against the regime in the South in the late ‘50s,
US advisers accompanied South Vietnamese units in the field in what was in
effect a Vietnamese civil war.
Advisors were armed although under
orders not to participate in combat, but it was dangerous duty, and the first
US advisors were killed in hostile action with insurgents in 1959. By the end
of his second term in ‘60, Ike found ways around the Geneva limits, and the US
had nearly 900 military personnel on the ground in the Republic of Vietnam, as
the South was formally known.
A decade of US arms and men in the
middle of a small war in a distant country – could that be regarded as the genesis
of America’s Vietnam War? To be fair to the President, he did say in his
Memorial Day address that we must measure our initial involvement by a ‘major
operation’. So let’s for the moment hold in abeyance Washington’s choice of
1962 and consider alternate years that could have been construed as the
beginning of the Vietnam War.
Even if we consider
individual years of the first half of the ‘60s, we’re still looking at a war we
slid into. Or to use the more apt metaphor, we gradually slipped into a
quagmire. Nevertheless, let’s consider other candidates from which to start the
count toward a 50th anniversary, working backward. Why not the year
1965 when the first Marine combat units went ashore at Danang and ‘Rolling
Thunder’, the systematic bombing campaign of the North, commenced. In the
popular mind that has long been considered our biggest escalatory step, the
first introduction of US combat troops and the commencement of what became
known as Lyndon Johnson’s war.
Green
Beret M/Sgt Donald Duncan
Acutely aware that he had to take dramatic action to restore
his credibility as a leader, JFK looked around the globe for a place he could
demonstrate his toughness and concluded “Vietnam looks like the place.”* He
significantly stepped up the US presence in South Vietnam. From his predecessor
he had inherited a small advisory group that had been providing military advice
to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) in their fight with the elusive
North Vietnamese-inspired guerrilla insurgency. The enemy force, called the
Liberation Army of Vietnam was soon pejoratively dubbed the Viet Cong or VC, a
name that gained in respect as the guerrillas demonstrated their combat skills
and courage.
The VC operated by stealth in the mountains and jungles of
the interior, striking suddenly and lethally, and just as quickly withdrawing
before superior counterforce could be brought to bear. Kennedy decided to meet
them on their own terms, and by the end of his first year he had nearly
quadrupled the US advisory force in South Vietnam to over 3,000 men, including
many Green Beret teams, as well as squadrons of helicopters for tactical
mobility and fighter-bombers manned by US pilots.
Since the Pentagon was casting about for a precise year from
which to date the war for a 50th anniversary, why not have called
1961 the beginning of the American war in Vietnam, Kennedy’s war? That would
have meant launching the 13-year Vietnam War Commemoration in 2011, but that
decision would have ignored the presidential election cycle, not a good idea
from the White House point of view. Aside from the axiom that it’s always a
good for an incumbent seeking re-election to issue positive announcements in an
election year, was there anything else possibly to be gained by instead
declaring 2012 the anniversary of US involvement and the beginning of the
commemoration?
In the short term, yes, according to a cable news pundit.
Apparently, the President did not do well with veterans in the ’08 election,
and two states that may be in contention as swing states, Virginia and North
Carolina, are both heavy in veterans. Taking a longer view though, might there
be a downside to ignoring other very plausible years for the war’s inception
and instead positing 1962? Judge for yourself. In his Memorial Day speech at
the Wall on Memorial Day, President Obama expressly referred to a major
American operation in January ’62. He was alluding to the disastrous Battle of
Ap Bac, not far from the capital Saigon, which commenced a few days after New
Year’s.
Ap Bac is an odd point of departure for a long term
celebration. The outcome was a major victory for the Viet Cong despite being
outnumbered 10:1, heavy ARVN casualties, and, although the advisors were only
in a combat support role, significant US losses – nearly a dozen Americans
killed or wounded, five choppers shot down, and the rest riddled with VC
bullets. An omen of what was to come?
Starting the commemoration in 2012 based on a major setback
in 1962 and then concluding it in 2025, 13 years later on the 50th
anniversary of the 1975 fall of Saigon as the last Americans scrambled to
escape, makes for a symmetry of defeat quite appropriate for our ill-fated venture, but an unusual way of honoring veterans
of the war.
*D Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1972),
77
†
